The desktop notes is great, I tend to use it a lot to keep notes of small ideas and things to remember - I also like Tomboy, but this is nice for quickie things. Tomboy is nice for mind maps and the like. It’s great that the notes are hidden from the window list.
But, wouldn’t be great if one could “shade” the notes (roll-up to a titlebar only) so that the first line of the note would form the title. The problem with the current notes is best described with this image:
Wouldnt it be much nicer if you could do this?
And could still see the first lines, so you would know which one is your “TODO” and which one has the meeting notes from yesterdays meeting.. And it would be nice for private stuff too, that you could “fold” them shut on the desktop.. For the same reason I dont think always on top is a good idea by default.. I think of those as desktop items rather. There’s the “show desktop” functionality (that could use some love too, to implement the good ideas people had) and well, the window manager provides the “on top” functionality if you *want* to have notes on top. I dont think it is a good idea to make it the default.
Of course, I havent checked out the latest CVS, so maybe it’s all changed already 
Yes! This is possible with Mac OS X stickies, but not with any of the notes software I’ve used on Linux. It drives me nuts.
I was thinking:
Notes should never be deleted. When you close a note, it just disappears. It doesn’t ask you, “Do you want to delete this,” it just closes the note. (You never have to think about notes persistance.)
But you should be able to get back a history of all your notes. Under the existing menu, there is “Delete Notes.” Get rid of that; Replace it with “Previous Notes.” That opens a display showing you the times and title (if any) of all previous notes. You can reactivate notes from here.
Of course, maybe you have something sensitive in one. It should be possible to shred one, from this same menu.
Oh, and: Well, this display of old stickies is very similar to your column of sticky titles.
What would be nice would be if one of these apps could ‘merge’ or feed in to an app like freemind: http://freemind.sf.net/ which is a nice tool for organising cluttered brains.
Actually I’ve been working on something similar using java-gnome, although it doesn’t look like yellow stickies. Basically just a window with a list showing whatever fits on the first line, and if you double click it the full note is shown. I am currently porting it to java-gnome 2.9.x and it may take a while (school starting).
anyone know if these notes eiter a) intergrate with the evolution todo list, b) are planned to?
that would be so rad.
Phil, thanks for the tip about freemind, it looks pretty cool and useful!
I sent a patch to Davyd that makes the always-on-topness configurable. We’ll see what he things. Shading would be cool, I agree.
I’ve always thought that a behaviour of toggling “Hide All Notes” on middle-click is one feature that I would really find usefull and effiecient in the operation of the aplet (Shift middle-click could be used to toggle the “Shade/Unshade all note” functionality too). Or vice versa.
keybindings for shading/unshading would be great as well! middle click - bam! - all unshaded and cascaded!