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Free alternatives to Apple’s Stickies

Scribbling a note is a key task, and a good system to electronically capture notes is vital. I previously used Stickies, provided by Apple. It was frustrating to have open an extra program just to make or retrieve a note. Stickies had no other purpose. And capturing more than a few jottings with Stickies is difficult, given there is limited screen real-estate. However, there are better, free alternatives.

Scribblet is a menubar program that is unobtrusive and simple. You can define a trigger to open a new note, and there is basic organization of notes into drawers


Sketchbox is a similar interface to the familiar Stickies interface, but with a functional twist. Each sticky note can contain a sketch, text and an alarm. So you can extend it beyond simply jotting. Sketchbox is donation-ware, so not strictly free.



Mobile iPhone addicts should check out iPhoneNotes. It allows you to edit notes from your iPhone on your desktop. Unfortunately, it is only available fro jailbroken phones up to 2.0, with OpenSSH installed. This is by the same guy who writes Mighty Docs for the iPhone, which allows you to sync your google docs for offline viewing. Another great program, and also free.



My pick of the bunch is Evernote. This is a cross-platform, scalable online repository for your stuff. I use the desktop client to write short notes as I used to use stickies. There are desktop apps for Mac and Windows and the iPhone. That means you can add notes from where you are.

Evernote handles a whole bunch of other types of stuff too - images and PDFs being probably the most useful. And furthermore, it is searchable. Even text in images is searchable. The killer app.

What apps do you use to capture all your stuff?

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