Shock Sticker is a desktop “sticky” notes program that offers a full range of features including full rich text editing, alarms, passwords, and quick notes transfer to other users of the program. Notes can be hidden and retrieved from the tray icon or minimized to small floating icons on the desktop.
In the past few days I’ve come across no less than three desktop notes programs that I had not seen before. Most noteworthy of these is Shock Sticker, because (a) it offers a full range of features, and (b) has a very nice/useable method of minimizing notes so that they are easily within reach but do not crowd the screen.
Although I find desktop sticky notes programs to be interesting and useful, I stopped using them some time ago simply because I had so many on-screen at one time that my screen was too cluttered, and I remember minimizing/maximizing them to the application in the system tray was less than intuitive. What I like about this program is that it minimizes your notes to a small floating icons on the desktop that take very little space on the one hand but keep all of your notes readily accessible on the other (see screenshot).
Here are some notes on this program:
- Minimizing/hiding: notes can be minimized to floating icons, or hidden and retrieved using the program’s tray icon. You can easily hide and show all notes if you need to (or otherwise unhide or maximize just the note you need).
- Display: you can use a little red pushpin on the note itself to keep it showing on top of other windows (works for when note is maximized or minimized). A note’s color can be easily changed. You can select one of the default available colors or, if they aren’t to your liking, create your own color schemes in the program options.
- Editing: offers full rich text editing. The editing toolbar (on the note itself) can be easily shown or hidden, which is quite cool. URLs typed into a note are ’live’ and will open in the browser when clicked.
- Titles: each note has a title that can be edited freely. Seems like an obvious feature but is in fact sometimes absent from sticky notes programs.
- Searching: you can find text within a note, or use the ’find’ command from the app’s system tray to search across all notes.
- Passwords: can be set for individual notes such that a user is unable to maximize or unhide a locked note without one. Although you can set an application level password (rather than individually) it did not seem to work when I tested it.
- Alarms: can be set for each note.
- Connectivity: notes can be instantly sent to an IP address or to someone on the network who is running the application on their machine. Note that I did not test this feature myself.
- Sound effects: this program features clicking and whizzing sounds whenever you use its different functions. This was a little strange at first but I soon grew to like it. You can switch sound effects off from the options page.
- Memory use: takes about 12 megs in memory, which is not a lot for this type of program.
Wish list (or how this program can be even better):
- URL linking: I would love to see the ability to link a word to a URL, such that I do not need to clutter a note with the full URL and can use it as a de-facto bookmark manager.
- Snapping to edges: for minimized or maximized notes, it would be fantastic if there was an option whereby these magnetically snapped together (or close together) whenever they were within x pixels of each other.
- Import/export notes function.
The verdict: this program came out of nowhere to become my favorite sticky notes. It does not offer PDA support, as Stickies does for example (another excellent freeware stickies program), but I find that to be a nonissue myself. Highly recommended.
Compatibility: Windows 2000, 2003, XP; no info on Vista.
Go to the Program page to Download the latest version (approx 611K).
