3 days ago
A sticky notes app for Safari transformed how I get work done on macOS
Just a few days ago, the Mozilla Foundation announced that Pocket was shutting down. One of the most popular bookmarking and webpage saving tools out there, especially among journalists and researchers, Pocket leaves a gap that will be hard to fill.
The absence will be felt deeply because there's no viable alternative that can offer it all in a polished package. To users tied to the Apple Mac ecosystem, they have even fewer choices for a few reasons. The most notable among them all? Safari's save later and bookmarking system.
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Why is Safari a laggard?
Safari's lack of a rewarding tool, one where you can organize your ideas and save-worthy content, is quite puzzling. All you have are reading lists and bookmarks. It almost feels like a relic in the face of competitors, and even more so when compared to the solutions you find out there from no-name developers and the open-source community.
That's one of the core reasons I stick with Collections in Edge and Pinboards in Opera. They are well-designed, offer plenty of organization tricks, and can even be shared. But they are still hidden behind a UI, not something you can have in front of your eyes at all times.
An annotated element, highlighted segments, or personal notes you can fix just at the right spot on a webpage is a solution that no utility has managed to offer in a usable fashion. You can find plenty of sticky notes apps that put stuff on your desktop screen, but not on the web destinations where you get work done.
This is where Sticky Notes for Safari comes into the picture. Technically, it's a Mac app that lives as an extension in the Safari browser and costs less than a cup of black coffee. It's light, barebones in just the right way, and captures the true spirit of sticky notes positioned on a scrolling digital canvas.
How does it work?
Sticky Notes for Safari is pretty straightforward. You install it from the Mac App Store, pay the $3 fee, and give it permission to run in Safari. That's it, and you're good to go. The next time you open Safari, it will appear as a tiny sticky notes option to the left of the URL bar.
Let's say you are reading a web page, and want to add a sticky note at a particular spot. All you need to do is click on the extension's icon, and you will have a tiny colored box where you can type your word. The sticky notes are freely resizable, so you can position them to your exact liking.
Alternatively, you can right-click on any webpage and click on 'Add Sticky Notes' in the action box. Now, when a sticky first appears on a webpage, it's set to a certain text size and paper color. You can, thankfully, change the default for each. You can also change the paper color on the fly and pick from six options.
I prefer this simplicity, instead of having something too fancy, such as a color dial or a massive drop-down of color-coded boxes. As for the sticky notes, they are freely movable, and resizable, so you have that flexibility.
It solves a realistic problem
I believe the best app is the one that solves a tangible problem and doesn't try to cram more features than users actually need. Sticky Notes for Safari takes the former route. You can pin a note at any spot on a webpage, and it stays there.
What happens when I close the browser tab? The next time you visit the webpage, the sticky note will be there to greet you. How about closing the browser itself? Not a problem. You see, the note attaches itself to the specific webpage. And even if you clear the browser cache, the color notes stay.
What I love most about the app is that it keeps things simple. Beyond the task of creating sticky notes and pinning them to any spot, you also get a neat catalog where you can search through the entire notes history.
First, it serves as a neatly organized place where you can find all the sticky notes you have created so far. There's a neat Search feature at the top where you can look through the notes saved on a page using keywords. I've created an unwritten rule for my sticky notes.
I prefer red for more pressing or critical pieces of note. Green represents my own personal opinions, while blue is reserved for notes where the words are destined for my journalistic duties (such as sending media queries) tied to the blue DigitalTrends brand logo.
Second, there's also a view all section where you find all your notes arranged in chronological order. When you tap on any of the cards, it takes you straight to the web page where it is saved. To save me the chore of scrolling too much, I simply Search (Command + F) on this page, land on the sticky note I was looking for, and with a single click, go straight to the webpage where it lives.
In a nutshell, Sticky Notes for Safari combines the idea of bookmarks and reading lists in one go. In fact, I no longer have any other third-party installed on my Mac except this neat tool for my Safari-based workflow.
Boiling it to the core
Of course, it's not perfect. For example, when you enable Reader Mode in Safari, these sticky notes away are no longer visible. They appear as you return to the regular viewing mode, though. I wish there were a few more text formatting options for text clusters and the text, but personally, I find it to be a fundamental blunder.
The point of sticky notes is just quickly writing what's on your mind, and revisiting it at a time of your convenience. For some reason, you can't trigger the system-level font styling and spell check tools, something you can easily do in other apps such as Notes.
By default, the app saves everything as plaintext, even if you save stylized text from another app, it will be stripped of all that formatting in the sticky notes. In hindsight, you don't have to worry about copy-pasting heavily formatted content, as the app will do that for you.
If you trying to copy an image, it would be pasted as the image's URL link on the sticky note. Finally, there's this little functional overlap with shortcuts. When you hit Command+T in Apple Notes, it opens the font styles. In Safari, by default, that shortcut opens a browser tab.
I wish it could borrow some of the shortcuts and UI customization ideas from Antinote, which offers the best note-taking experience I've ever used in an app. But then, there's only so much you can do with a web extension compared to a full-fledged app.
But for the sum of its parts, Sticky Notes for Safari does more than it's intended to. It's minimalist, solves a practical browser problem, and then doubles as a beautiful hub that ends the reliance on dedicated or built-in bookmarking tools. I'd say that's a task well done.
