Productivity Portfolio

Throughout the years, there have been many software programs that provide pop-up note or sticky note functionality. I first used one called Tornado Notes back in 1986 or so. Since then, there have been many products and improvements. Many companies including 3M have produced such a utility. Most of these products have similar features, but I found one that has several unique features.

The product is called Quick Notes Plus by Conceptworld. The feature that caught my eye is the capability to make a sticky note context sensitive. You can attach a sticky note to a document, file, or web page. As example, today I received a coupon from Handango. I copied the coupon code and details into a sticky note and went to the Handango site. I then attached the sticky note to their web page. I also added an alarm since the coupon expires at month-end. Now, when I return to the Handango site, I'll see my rolled up sticky note right where I left it. I don't have to search my email for my coupon code as it's in the text of the sticky note.

This window attachment feature works on any web page whether it's referencing a specific article, customer account, book and so on. One caveat is that if you attach the sticky note to a website using Firefox, you won't see the sticky note if you browse to the page using Internet Explorer and vice versa. While some could call this a limitation, I found it useful for noting how different browsers display a page. For people that do usability or web testing, this can be a nice feature.

While we've used this attach feature mostly on the web, it has plenty of other uses. Recently, we had to review a dozen resumes that came in as email attachments. Using this feature, we attached our comments and questions to each resume. When it came time for a phone interview, we opened each resume and looked at the previous sticky notes. We've used the same approach for product spec sheets. You can also attach a sticky note to multiple documents, which can be handy for cross-referencing.

The other item that differed from most products is Quick Notes Plus can sync your sticky notes with Microsoft Outlook. This feature allows you to either put all your sticky notes into Outlook's Note folder or to create subfolders with the memoboards names from Quick Notes Plus. Memoboards are virtual boards where you can assign sticky notes. For example, I created a memoboard called QNP article, which has my sticky notes on this software.

The advantage to using memoboards is you can include or exclude specific memoboards from syncing to Microsoft Outlook. The syncing features works quite well, but is also limited by Outlook's note structure. Specifically, we would prefer to have the Quick Note Plus title used as the subject line in the Outlook note. Instead, the Quick Note Plus title is discarded in lieu of the first line of the sticky note.

While Outlook syncing is a great feature, it highlighted an irritation we had with the program. We couldn't systematically get the current date and time stamp to appear at the bottom of the sticky note. The program includes many preference settings and one of them is the ability to automatically add the date and time. However, as much as we fiddled with this setting, it only seemed to work if we inserted the time at the top of the sticky note. At first, we didn't think this was an issue till we did our first sync with Microsoft Outlook. We soon realized Outlook was grabbing that date and time as the subject. Although the time stamp is important, it doesn't make a good subject for Outlook notes. You can work around this limitation by adding line returns or keyboard shortcuts for the time and date.

The other irritation we had were the reminders to register the software. We thoroughly understand the need for the company to offer these reminders. However, we were a bit surprised when we hit our hotkey to create a sticky note and the reminder randomly appeared. The benefit of this program for me is to quickly capture ideas before something distracts me. When the registration reminder note appeared, I forgot what I wanted to type. I think the company should limit these interruptions until the user has become fully acquainted with the positive aspects of the program.

Aside from the few irritations, we found the program very useful and worth the cost. If you've used other notes programs, you'll be pleased to know Quick Notes Plus offers many features you expect of notes programs such as:

Update 02/19/2005 After releasing this article, I received a thoughtful email from the publishers. Of particular interest, is the next version of Quick Notes Plus will include Palm syncing. They also indicated they would revise the registration reminders. The next version is due in about a month.