StickyPad

We've all used sticky notes, the ubiquitous yellow squares that work great for affixing notes to paperwork, computer monitors, and planners. StickyPad is one of many programs that seek to replicate the usefulness of sticky notes on your computer desktop. It's actually one of the more elegant and useful options we've seen, and it's worth checking out if you could use an unobtrusive but handy way to keep track of important information.

StickyPad appears as an icon in the system tray, and clicking it launches a small menu with options to create a new note or show all existing notes. The menu also includes four convenient shortcuts to frequently used applications; the defaults are Explorer, Windows Media Player, Notepad, and Calculator, but these can easily be customized. Notes are also highly customizable, with options for color, font, text size, and transparency.

Notes can be pinned to the desktop or hidden and then retrieved via the system tray icon. We loved how smart the reminder feature was; it accepts multiple formats, such as "6:00 PM," "in 30 minutes," or "3/1/12." When it was time for the reminder, StickyPad displayed an alert message and played a pleasant chime that repeated until we turned it off. The program comes with a well-written Help file, but we didn't need to consult it; everything about StickyPad was intuitive. Overall, we thought that StickyPad was among the best sticky-note programs we've seen, and we recommend it.