Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Today I stumbled upon Clippings Firefox extension.  It makes it very easy to save and organize bits and pieces of text.  It offers really simple and intuitive interface, supports folders and drag-n-drop.  It’s the closest Firefox alternative to notes implementation in Opera, and I really enjoy it already, even though I used for just a few hours.

There are only things that I can think of that could make this extension better: search and support for hyperlinks.  Other than that, it’s just perfect.

By pure luck I cam across a new service, which is still currently in beta, - My Stickies. Within the first second I realized that it was something that I waited for a long time now.

In essence, My Stickies allows you to attach yellow sticky notes to websites. You can have as many of these notes attached to as many websites as you want. Whenever you come back to the website, you will see all your notes at the same place and of the same size as you left them.

Not only this functionality alone is great news, but there is more. You can even see your notes from a different place. This is great, because you can add notes to sites at home, and than see them later on in the office - no synchronizations are needed.

You can also see all your notes at their website. You can tag them, search them, and use notes as a sort of bookmarks.

Getting all this is easy too. All you have to do is register at My Stickies and install the Firefox extension. The service is free and works exactly as expected. Check it out.

KDE has an excellent helper tool - knotes. It a small application that allows one to create notes similar to yellow Post-it that are so familiar to everyone. With knotes it is possible to create notes in all fonts, colors, and sizes as well as set alarms on those notes, display them over all desktops, above or below all windows, etc.

I knew about this application for a long time now, but never got used to using it until recently. After thinking a bit about what kept me away from it, I realized that these were the shortcuts. Particularly, there are two shortcuts which can make all the difference - “New Note” and “New Note From Clipboard”. By default, some weird keys (Alt+Shift+N and Alt+Shift+C) are assigned to these actions. Very inconvenient and non-ituitive.

Using knotes’ configuration dialogue I reconfigured the shortcuts to be F12 for an empty new note and Ctrl+F12 for a new note with clipboard content. That feels way better now. Try it and you’ll be surprised…

P.S.: Now I wisht that knotes could have transparent window background…