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Hands-On Apple 236: macOS Stickies
00:12:26
The Classic Note App You Forgot You Had
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Open your applications folder, scroll down, and there it is. Stickies, an app so old it predates Mac OS X, sitting untouched while you paid for a note taking app that does the same thing. But Stickies has a few moves the fancy apps don't. And today we're gonna make it earn its place on your desktop. Stay tuned,
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podcasts you love from people you trust.
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This is TW it. Welcome back to Hands on Apple. I am Micah Sargent and today we are talking all things Stickies. Yes, the sticky Note application for macros that I think for some people, you know, they've perhaps moved on, moved along to bigger, better things and left good old Stickies there in the dust. Well, it's still a pretty powerful little application and something that you might actually find out that you enjoy. So let's talk about where we go to get it, what we do, how it works, etc. Etc. Etc. We gotta head over to Mac OS to take a look. Alright, so on Mac os, how do we go about finding it? Well, if we hold down the command key, hit the spacebar and start to type in stick, then you'll find Stickies. The icon itself has been redesigned for the latest version of macOS, but immediately you are presented with Stickies. What's great is that it's a lightweight application. You know, it loads instantly. You don't have to worry about accounts and setting things up. And when you create a note, it's there. You don't have to choose folders, you don't have to go through a launch screen, you don't need to duplicate. No, it's just there, it's easy, it's always available and frankly it's dumb as it's supposed to be. So right here I see that I'm able to, for example, have this note with all sorts of formatting. I can get rid of this note by hitting the close button. I can collapse the note by double clicking the bar, bringing it back and I can boop say oh, I don't need this anymore and delete it. You'll note that in this sticky I'm able to see that you can format text with different fonts and font sizes. You can do bold, you can do italics, you can change the color, you could even put in little graphics. Check that out. Stickies does have the other option, including being able to spell check and do more. So we can take a look at what all you're able to do with Stickies. But the important thing is that Stickies is different from the Notes app or from the reminders app. It's different from a third party option primarily because of the lack of friction that's here, right? It's always on the screen. It's just simple. It's great for like quick captures or little things that you always want to be able to reference on your desktop. Have it be visible and then you know when you don't need it and you don't need it to be syncing across devices or that you need to keep this as a storage space, then you go for something else. But for something as simple as just oh, here's a note about a thing I need to check later. It's not quite in the reminders, it's not quite in your bigger notes field. That is where you would want to go. So let me get more into stickies after we take a quick break so I can tell you about the sponsor of this week's episode of Hands on Apple. 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FedRamp and ISO 27001 certified and meet SOC2 and HIPAA high Trust standards for information security management. Clean data leads to better marketing, ROI, higher customer lifetime value and AI that works as intended. Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com TWiT that's melissa.com TWiT thank you, Melissa, for sponsoring this week's episode of Hands on Apple. All right, we are back to the show and talking this week about Stickies, the lightweight application for making and taking notes on your macOS desktop. An app that's been around for longer than Mac OS X, but I think it gets forgotten. Now. There are different ways to set this up, so you can see that I have a blue note here. If we look at the menu bar, here are the options that we have. Of course we've got your basic option of seeing stickies in the menu bar. Not a lot there. Sometimes you'll get settings and other things, but when an app doesn't require that, then you don't need it, right? We have the option to create a new note, import and export text. You can also take all of the notes that you've written and export them to the Notes app, or you can also print them. You have your basic options of being able to of course, cut, copy and paste, but you can also add links. You can use find and replace tools. You do have access to the AI writing tools that Apple has added over time. And of course the ability to read out the text that you have on the screen with font. You can change the font. You can make it bold, italics, you can underline, strike through outline text, make it bigger or smaller. But it also has options for kerning, for ligatures, and for baselines, so you are able to take it even further. And then of course, the ability to change the color of the text by highlighting, choosing show colors, and then making an adjustment. The color option in the menu bar is not for color of text, but instead is for the color of the sticky. There are six options, yellow, blue, green, pink, purple, and gray. And holding down the command key and hitting the numbers 1 through 6 let you quickly change the color. So you could set things up to where a yellow sticky always means something to do with work and a blue sticky is always something to do with home. Perhaps a green sticky is for things that are happening outside of your home, for activities, that kind of a thing. And then you can take it from there. And then of course, you have the option to not only have your notes always float on top of other windows, so you could see that even though I have Safari, the sticky note is above it, but you can also make it so that they are translucent so that the text is still readable, but the sticky itself is translucent and gives you the ability to see through it. That will let you set these stickies on your screen, have them continue to float there. But then I can do command N to bring up a new sticky and I am able to take that sticky full size if I need to. Or as we mentioned before, collapse the sticky by clicking the small collapse button or double clicking on the top bar and then I can type some text. So very cool that you can keep these things on the screen that you can bold, that you can italicize, that you can drop little graphics. You are always able to go through and customize these just like a sticky in real life or a more complicated notes app. That said, it's not necessarily the sticky note or the rather the notes app for everyone in this mode if you are looking for something that is far safer. For one thing, this is sort of equivalent to having a note that you have on your desktop, right? A sticky note on your desk. Stickies, they're stored locally. They don't sync to your other devices. They are there on the disk and so keeping them on the screen makes it possible for someone to be able to read what is there. Ultimately, if you are looking for something that's going to sync between devices, will have security features, will have those privacy features in place. Stickies is not the thing for you. But for these simple little notes that you want to leave a quick little reminder, it's a great place to go. So as I've been doing, I'll give you a little bit of homework here if you would like to follow through. Open up the stickies app. Make a note for something that you reference constantly. Maybe it's a tracking number you've been looking at recently or the guest wifi address that's not necessarily a bad thing to have there. A little grocery list, or maybe it's your online shopping list for example, and set it to float on top. Keep it on your screen for about a week and see if this simple little text holding app can earn a spot in your workflow. TextEdit, I do love you, but sometimes it's nice to have a visible little note right there on the screen. Folks, that's going to bring us to the end of this episode of Hands On Apple. I want to remind you all about Club Twit at Twit tv. Club Twit. Be sure to check it out. You can get lots of great benefits including every single one of our shows ad free, plus a bunch of other stuff. Twit tv Club Twit has all of that information. One of the newest features that we have, it's chapter markers. Yes, if you have been waiting for chapter markers for Twitch shows, this is the time to hop on board. So be sure to check out Club Twit. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll be back next week with another episode of Hands on Apple. But until then, email me Micahit TV or Hoa TV with your questions, comments, concerns, etc. Bye bye.
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