With so much going on in our lives these days, it sometimes becomes really difficult to remember the small things such as paying bills, making an important call, getting an appliance serviced, and more. Agreed, this is the age of smartphones, and there are a plethora of apps that claim to help you with all this, but as most of you would agree, among so many notifications (related to missed calls, text messages, WhatsApp messages, and social media services like Facebook and Twitter) already on your phone, these work-related reminders are usually lost.
What I am trying to say is that the stuff that matters (and requires timely action) needs special attention, and for that it needs to be in front of your eyes most of the time. This brings us to sticky notes – their digital incarnation to be more specific. If you haven’t used a sticky notes app until now, I can only say that you have to try one out to understand how effective and useful they are.
In this article we will discuss one such app called Indicator-Stickynotes.
Note: all the commands and instructions mentioned in this article have been tested on Ubuntu 16.04.
Indicator-Stickynotes
Written in Python3 and GTK3, Indicator-Stickynotes is a sticky notes app for Ubuntu systems. It lets you make notes that can act as reminders. Developed by Umang Varma, Indicator-Stickynotes is an active project, although it’s only receiving bug-fixing updates now. According to its Launchpad page, no new features are being added at this point.
We’ve used version 0.5.7 of the application for this article.
Download and Install
You can easily download and install Indicator-Stickynotes on your Ubuntu box by running the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:umang/indicator-stickynotes sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install indicator-stickynotes
Once the application is installed successfully, you can launch it by running the following command:
indicator-stickynotes
Using the Sticky Notes App
When the tool is launched, its icon quietly appears in the system tray (the leftmost icon in the screenshot below).
Click on the icon, and you’ll see options to create a new note, show/hide all notes, lock/unlock all notes, export/import note data, and more.
Here’s what happens when you try creating a new note.
A new note UI appears. You can note down stuff in the main area, and then click the lock icon to lock the note or to make it non-editable.
The “X” button on the top-left lets you delete the note, while the down arrow button (the second to last one on the top-right) lets you configure the note UI in a way that it’s always on top no matter what you are doing on your system. Plus, you can also access settings from here.
The tool’s “Settings” window contains only one option: Categories.
You can create a new category and describe its name, background and text color as well as font size. There’s also an option to set a newly-created category as default.
Categories help you in situations where you want to keep notes of different kinds (such as work-related, home-related, and more) visually distinct. Here’s an example of two notes from different categories.
If you want to migrate your notes from one system to another, the ‘Export Data’ and ‘Import Data’ options are there to make your task easy. Just export the existing notes data into a file, then store this file on the target system, and finally use the import option there to import data from this file.
Conclusion
Indicator-Stickynotes might not be a feature-rich application, but it does offer all the basic functionality that is expected from such a software – don’t forget, the whole idea behind sticky notes is to have the information on the screen and in your face, so the chances of you forgetting anything are minimal. If you’re an Ubuntu user and have been looking for a basic solution to help you improve your productivity, go ahead and install Indicator-Stickynotes.
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Himanshu Arora
Himanshu Arora is a freelance technical writer by profession but a software programmer and Linux researcher at heart. He covers software tutorials, reviews, tips/tricks, and more. Some of his articles have been featured on IBM developerworks, ComputerWorld, and in Linux Journal.
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