593: It’s All Based on Stickies, with Paul Kafasis

College prof here. I rarely use Stickies myself, but I see that my students use it A LOT. Their screens are covered in stickies for class assignments, club activities, etc. It makes me happy to see (but a little worried about what happens when those laptops die or fall in the toilet and their stuff isn’t backed up).

3 Likes

When I saw Quick Notes i WWDC, I thought my beloved Stickies were gone for good, but apparently they run the show, haha.

I still use one Stickie on my desktop for upcoming dates, todo and the next games from Game Pass because i have them every time in my view. Apple Notes for long time notes and Drafts for spoken thoughts (speech to text) from my Apple Watch to my Mac.

1 Like

I kept waiting for Paul to mention that the RougeAmoeba web site was once an April fools day joke with a pink amoeba wearing a bandana and wielding an assault rifle. Wish I had a screen shot of that. Seems like that was in the “Classic” Mac OS days (7, 8, 9).

Tried to follow Paul’s advice about installing a macOS beta on an external drive and it turns out there are a whole lot of asterisks if you have an M1 Mac.

  1. the drive has to be formatted as APFS
  2. You have to install macOS 11 first and then upgrade it to the macOS 12 beta
  3. Your drive must be a Thunderbolt 3 drive. Not USB 3 over USB-C. No. Only native Thunderbolt 3 or else macOS won’t install.

And that’s where I got stuck. Just for funsies I did a quick search for how much thunderbolt 3 drives are going for these days. Answer: about $350 for 1TB. No thanks.

Also, another nice little asterisk. If your external drive is compatible with an apple Silicon Mac then it won’t be compatible with an Intel Mac. Sigh.

I use Stickies and Notes. I’ve never lost a Sticky, but have lost notes in the “cloud”. Since I do regular backups the Stickies are backed up. Students should know that regular backups are important and that cloud sync is not a backup.

Joined the forum just to report on how I use stickies.

Just yesterday I used it to paste an image into it so that it would be “always on top” during a screenshare. super handy!

3 Likes

One of my favorite interviews.

I wish they would have asked him about Pulsar, and what went down there. I know they said XM kept changing the API, but I wonder if there were any legal wranglings as well. Pulsar was one of my favorite apps. I also would like to know his thoughts on Apples apparent march to locking down the mac and going appstore only for installations. I believe this would seriously impact RA software.

Definitely an interesting interview! I love the old school devs. Thanks @MacSparky and @ismh

3 Likes

I use stickies when I am projecting my second screen on the board. I work at a school program for youth with emotional and behavioral disabilities. I’ll project a timer counting down to the next activity along with a sticky note that says what they should be working on and the next upcoming activity so they know what they are supposed to be doing and for how long. Stickies have been perfect for this little mini daily agenda.

2 Likes

I am a developer. At any given time I have 5-10 open tasks (jira tickets) that have corresponding branches in my git software. I keep a floating sticky note above my terminal window with a list of all of my active branches so I can quickly switch between them. I also use the sticky as a scratch pad to track tasks for each branch. It’s great and unobtrusive, and provides the perfect level of contextual relevance for me.

1 Like

I use Stickies when I have to leave my Mac and need to remember exactly where I got to on whatever it was I was working on.

2 Likes

I use Stickies on my kids laptop. I set up a KM shortcut that, when she activates it from the menu bar, it allows her to capture a region of the screen and it sticks that into a stickie note. This is whenever when wants to capture something quickly in a zoom class. It just saves the screen captures one after the other in the same note.

3 Likes

Thanks for this. I’ve just set up something a bit different based on it: I usually use Hyperkey+5 to trigger the default screen capture tool.

I’ve now set up Hyperkey+6 to save a screenshot of the whole screen to a folder on my computer with no dialog. Could be handy for speedy grabs like you mentioned.