DesktopNoteOK

Ever since Windows Vista, our instincts of grabbing a pen and a piece of paper to just write something down least we forget it have changed. With the introduction of Sticky Notes, our desktops have also become “refrigerator doors”, where we write down stuff we wish to remember. And, unlike a notepad, these notes stay there in our visual field, but without interfering with our work in any other way.

With Windows 10, you can still get Sticky Notes from the Microsoft App Store. In this process, Microsoft can collect your data, which is bad news if you’re deeply concerned with privacy. That’s why DesktopNoteOK might be a good alternative if you really need to write stuff down on your desktop.

DesktopNoteOK will allow you to make colorful text boxes instantly. That’s the program’s basic and best function, as you quickly adjust it to your aesthetic preferences, either by choosing one single color for all your notes, or just let DesktopNoteOK randomly choose colors for you. In this case, you can still choose between Random Dark Color, Random Light Color, and... Zufällige farbe – which is just German for “Random color”, and also an option that somehow didn’t get translated.

From the main window you can also select a theme for your notes, although this doesn’t make any noticeable difference in the way they are displayed. In fact, it doesn’t make any difference at all (at least for Windows 10), so, for now, we’ll have to consider this a bug.

What’s also buggy in the main window is that the transparency slider doesn’t change anything. That, and the fact that you’re better off not checking the “Hide bars automatically” option from the “New Note” drop-down menu, as the notes’ toolbars may remain hidden unless you restart the program. Thankfully, if you do that, your notes will remain saved.

Even though the application has quite a few bugs, we quickly found out that the notes themselves are actually OK to work with, as well as pretty. You can easily move them around, change their size, color and transparency, as well as play with the text font, size and color. You can configure a note (or more) to be “Always on Top”, so it is displayed above other software, and even generate a new note from within an already existing note. Thus you can forget about the buggy DesktopNoteOK main window, and forever banish it to the tray, where it belongs.

While it’s obvious the DesktopNoteOK needs a lot of improvement come further updates, it’s still a fairly usable and helpful tool if you just stick to the stickies.