Stickies

What is Stickies?

Stickies is a PC utility I wrote to try to cut down on the number of yellow notes I was leaving stuck to my monitor. It is a computerised version of those notes.

The design goal behind Stickies is that the program is small and simple. Stickies will not mess with your system files, or write to the registry. Stickies stores information in a single SQLITE database file.

Stickies will never support animated dancing figures, or play "Greensleeves". They are instead yellow rectangular windows into which you can put some notes. Once created, they will stay on screen until you take them away. Just like a real sticky piece of paper.

Main features

• Once on screen, notes will remain where placed until closed, even through reboots
• Stickies appearance can be customised; fonts, colours and buttons may be changed, and styles saved. Notes can be resized.
• Stickies can store text or images
• Stickies can be hidden for a certain period, until a specified date and time, or to wake every day, week or month, to act as reminders.
• Stickies can have alarms set to ensure you notice them at a point you choose
• International language, Unicode and RTL text support
• Stickies can snap to each other and to the sides of the screen to keep them neatly lined up
• Stickies can be attached to an application, web site, document or folder so they only show when it's on screen
• Stickies can be transferred from one machine to another either over a TCP/IP network connection, or by using an SMTP mail server or MAPI client:
• Hierarchical friends list, which may be automatically transferred from other friends
• Stickies works with Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10
• Stickies is small and simple, it writes to a database file, and does not alter the registry
• AD network administrators can use Group Policy to control settings
• API to allow integration with other applications
• ...and Stickies is completely free!

Accolades

Since I made Stickies available on the web, some people have been kind enough to write to me saying nice things about it:

• This is for everyone who has an affection for good sticky notes programs. We think Stickies is the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the custom deluxe, the coupe de ville of the sticky world of sticky notes. And it's sticky world out there. (Information Avenue)
• I've just downloaded Stickies, and wanted to let you know that I'm delighted! After wading through numerous other [yellow] note style programs, to-do list aps and other similar utilities, it is such a pleasure to find Stickies! It it so simple yet powerful, has useful features rather than gimmicks, and, of course, it's wonderfully free! (Andy Nix)
• Stickies must be the most efficient, simple, small, compact, fast, useful program I have EVER installed :) (Martin Cleaver)
• Downloaded your excellent program the other day. It's great to find something so elegant and effective in this monolithic software era. (Andrew Fung)
• Stickies is an intuitive, easy-to-use, valuable utility; [and] after reading the Reference Guide, Stickies has shown itself to be the most powerful utility I have ever used and has become indispensable for daily use. (Sam Dworkis)
• ...this time to thank you and commend you for the work ethic you so willingly demonstrate in support of your wonderful Stickies product...I can't think of any other software product, be it freeware, shareware, or pay to use that supports its users the way you do. (Dick Berman)
• It's so rare to come across a piece of software in the Windows world that's well written and functional throughout that's freeware. This is a professional piece of software that really works well. (Steve Chen)
• I have tested nearly 20 of these sticky note programs, but yours seems to be the best of all for my purposes. Thank you for the great work you have done! (Steffen Neumann)
• I don’t think I’ve ever used free software with such a high degree of professionalism and breadth of functionality, so I just wanted to say "Thank you" for this great product (Sue Miller)
• Stickies is beautifully implemented, well-documented and, astonishingly, it's free. We think you'll love it. (PC Advisor)
• I thought I would never begin to use desktop yellow notes until I found Stickies! (Jari Lehtonen)
• Stickies is the only software that I ever wanted to marry. (Peter Oliphant)

I know of users in Afghanistan, Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, The Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, The Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, South Korea, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of the Congo, Romania, Russia, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, St Helena, Slovakia, Slovenija, South Africa, Solomon Islands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay, United Arab Emirates, the UK, the US, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Zambia.

From the volume of mail I get I would guess there are tens of thousands of users. If you, or anyone else you know uses Stickies, and lives in another country to those listed above, I'd love to hear from you to add to the list of countries.

Stickies has the ability to support some other languages for the menus and dialog than English. However, as I don't speak other languages, I need help from others to translate the English language in Stickies. If you think you might be able to help translate around 1000 words and phrases, please drop me a line.

Accolades

Thanks to:

Miquel Pons and Francesc Estall for Catalan translation
Yu-Wei Chang, daviking222, Peter Yuen, QiuHao and Arnold Chang for Chinese translation
Hasan Osmanagić for Croatian translation
Filip Veverka, Tomáš Pekárek, Tomáš Nosek and Aleš Barák for Czech translation
Martin van Es, Joris Drenth, Piet van Hees, Dirk Goossens, Rob Jongejan, Jan de Ruiter and Bruno Willems for Dutch translation
Carsten Hansen, Peter Dragonetti and Jørgen Wendt for Danish translation
Thierry Dulait, Eyael, Gwénaël Kergadallan, utopya and Laurent Grenetfor French translation
Julio Mojón for Galician translation
Michael Ross, Andreas Poehlmann, Sascha Mrowka, Edgar "Fast Edi" Hoffmann and Jörg Häußler for German translation
Giorgos Kostopoulos, Nikos Tzovaridis and John Papadopoulos (Ιωάννης Παπαδόπουλος) for Greek translation
Daniel Cohen Gindi for Hebrew translation, and help with RTL reading order code
Ron Vollach for Hebrew translation
Jozsef Tamas Herczeg and Balázs Zoltán for Hungarian translation
Eddy Tlessh for Indonesian translation
yayo (Roberto Correzzola), Marco Banfi and Francesco Orazi for Italian translation
Mitsuhiro Yoshida and Yuki Saeki for Japanese translation
Seunghoe Yang, 김범석 and KIM JaeGeun for Korean translation
Piotr Murawski, Rafal Lampe and Sebastian Karwala for Polish translation
Eneida Gaspar and Fabio Mangolini for Portuguese (Brazilian) translation
Pedro Lino and José Carlos for Portuguese (standard) translation
Margarit-Mirica Georgescu for Romanian translation
Anton Granik, ava3v, Nikolay Komarov, Alexandr Perebeinos, Alexiz Kadev and Руслан Тертышный for Russian translation
Filip Starcevic for Serbian translation
Alojz Rakovec for Slovenian translation
Raul Bianchi Lastra, Christian Hess Araya, Mario Villar and Julio Mojón for Spanish translation
Martin Samuelsson for Swedish translation
Kuddusi Demir, Kenan Balamir and Emre Özcan EYIÖZ for Turkish translation
Igor Soyer and Руслан Тертышный for Ukrainian translation
Gwyndaf Hughes for Welsh (Cymraeg) translation

Contact

If you have any ideas or suggestions for Stickies, or (perish the thought!) find a bug, please get in touch. I try to reply to everyone who writes to me.

If you plan to review, or write a piece about Stickies in either an on-line or hard copy publication, I'd appreciate you dropping me a note to let me know. You're quite welcome to do so, but I'd just like to be able to grab a copy of your article.