OK. At long last I have converted the cluttered old mess of Stickies on my Mac (I had over 20) into something else. I’ve tried several other notes/thought organizer type apps and none of them, well… stuck. The recently released SketchBox freeware from omz:software did. It very simply solved all my problems. It also opened up all sorts of new possibilities.
It only took me messing with a couple of notes to decide to switch. If you have had the same problem of a crazy mess of notes all over your desktop, with many collapsed windows… and just too much pale yellow, then I think you may find the same joy. The big selling feature for me was the scalable SketchBox grid view of your notes. One great advantage of this is it eliminates the Stickies clutter when using Exposé. You also have the ability to attach notes to the desktop, which allows you to quickly get to very important notes – like To Do lists – with Exposé.
OK, if you’re checking the engineroom for it’s comic content, I hope you read this far, because the app can function as a super useful layout tool, and the drawing tools (you’ll have to check out the SketchBox site, or try the program to really get how the text and drawing layers work) has full support for your Wacom tablet.
This software is pretty new, so there are still a few features that it could use; but it’s in a pretty rapid development phase, so I’m sure we’ll see those, and more. On the obvious side, it could use some drag-and-drop import, export, and deleting of notes. Contextual menus would also be nice. The ability to create separate groups of notes in ‘pages’ would be essential if you want to get seriously into using it for developing sequential narratives; but, if you want it to help impose some simplicity and order to your notestream, then you’ll like the restriction of the one window (hey, you can always make the notes real tiny and scroll through as many as you care to make…). Did I mention the alarm clock? It’s pretty damn cool.
Of course, in just a few days we’ll have Spaces and Quick Look to play with in Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) so, yeah… we’ll see. In the meanwhile, I really like my SketchBox and will be happy to see it grow.
