Speaking of the desktop notes applet..
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 
January 11th, 2005 at 23:50
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.
January 12th, 2005 at 00:47
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.
January 12th, 2005 at 00:50
Oh, and: Well, this display of old stickies is very similar to your column of sticky titles.
January 12th, 2005 at 01:20
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.
January 12th, 2005 at 04:49
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).
January 12th, 2005 at 08:12
anyone know if these notes eiter a) intergrate with the evolution todo list, b) are planned to?
that would be so rad.
January 12th, 2005 at 08:20
Phil, thanks for the tip about freemind, it looks pretty cool and useful!
January 12th, 2005 at 16:30
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.
January 13th, 2005 at 07:22
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.
January 19th, 2005 at 03:09
keybindings for shading/unshading would be great as well! middle click - bam! - all unshaded and cascaded!
January 20th, 2005 at 08:25
I am a long-time sticky note addict… from Mac OS 5 or so! FreeMind looks very interesting.
You all are spot-on on the needs for a better sticky note… I would like to see a way to export them to PDAs with eath one cross-referenced from the date of creation and on text listing.
January 29th, 2005 at 18:19
bigger shots please!!