A brief ode to Stickies

As I was reflecting some more about my favourite features of Mac OS X over the 20 years of its history, I realised that I needed to add a very special mention to the list — the Stickies app.

And as soon as I thought of Stickies, I remembered that it’s an application that’s even older than Mac OS X. The first version of Stickies was written in 1994 by Jens Alfke, and debuted as part of System 7.5 in the same year. He developed the application in his spare time while working at Apple. Stickies was originally called Antler Notes, and in the classic Mac OS version of the app, there’s a nice Easter Egg reminding you of its origins.

By the way, during his time at Apple, Alfke contributed to many important features of the Mac operating system. Between 1991 and 1993 he was part of the team that developed AppleScript; he specifically helped to design the Open Scripting Architecture and created the Script Editor. Between 1993 and 1997 he worked on the development of the OpenDoc framework.

Later, in 2000, he started developing an instant messaging client that became iChat for Mac OS X, that was first introduced with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. He and his team later worked on expanding iChat’s features, resulting in the release of iChat AV in 2003. After leaving the iChat project, in late 2003 he joined the Safari team and worked on what then became Safari RSS, the RSS/Atom news reader and aggregator built into Apple’s Safari, which debuted in Safari 2.0, released with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. This feature was then removed with Safari 6.0 in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Back to Stickies, the amazing thing about this application is that it hasn’t essentially changed for the past 27 years. In Mac OS X, its icon has remained the same from version 10.0 to version 10.15. It was redesigned in Big Sur to better fit its æsthetic:

Stickies app icon up to Mac OS 10.15 Catalina

Stickies app icon in Mac OS 11 Big Sur

As for the app’s interface, apart from slight changes from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, it’s always been the same, in appearance and fundamental behaviour. Just to show you a few examples, here’s Stickies in Mac OS 7.6.1:

The About Stickies dialog box.

Note information

Stickies’ Preferences.

When you quit Stickies, this dialog appears.

Here’s Stickies in Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (PPC):

Here’s Stickies in OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan:

And here’s Stickies in Mac OS 11 Big Sur. As you can see, the default notes have stayed the same over the years:

As far as note taking goes, Stickies is a bit of an unsung hero among Mac applications. Often overlooked or dismissed, I’ve been using it on a rather constant basis probably since Mac OS 8.6 on my iMac G3 back in 1999. The amazing thing is that, backup after backup, migration after migration, when I now launch Stickies on my iMac, I can see all the notes I’ve been retaining for the past 20 years or so. ‘Sticky notes’ indeed.

Stickies are really versatile when you need to write down something quickly, and at the same time you want to keep notes right next to what you’re working on, exactly like their physical counterpart.

They support formatted text, so you can write using different fonts and styles.

You can easily create bulleted/numbered lists within a note.

You can import images in notes.

You can (of course) choose different colours for the notes, and choose to have notes always in front of other windows or keep them semi-transparent.

You can search text within a note or all the notes by pressing ⌘-F.

To save space, notes can be minimised by double-clicking on their title bars, just like you could collapse Finder windows in System 7.5 with the WindowShade feature.

More importantly, sticky notes are persistent. You don’t need to use a Save command — you never needed to. All the notes you create are retained when quitting the app. All the notes are there when you reopen it. Stickies keeps all information in a self-contained database, which can be easily backed up and migrated by copying the file StickiesDatabase, which is located in your Library (~/Library/StickiesDatabase).

I used to take advantage of Stickies’ flexibility especially during the first years of my career as a freelance translator, when I had to translate entire manuals, and needed to maintain a consistent technical glossary. I started with paper notebooks but, especially when working out of the home office, it was handier to have all my notes on the Mac, right beside the word processor or whatever application I was using to carry out my translations.

So cheers, Stickies! I’m glad you’re still around. And cheers to Jens Alfke — what a legacy.