Here's the author's own description of sid—î…≥ot—î.
"Sidenote tries to catch the “Stickies” spirit but in the form of a multi-document drawer that will hide in the corner of your screen (left or right). You can use it to take all your daily notes, include images and easily modify text color and font. Sidenote will automatically expand so that you will be able to drag into it any picture, text clipping or pdf file from the finder or your favorite application. Sporting notes auto-saving, you’ll never have to save your notes. Sidenote will handle that for you. You can also print them or export them to rtf."
I couldn't put it better myself. But what this elegant description doesn't do is tell you just how useful this program really is. First, it seems utterly reliable. In two years of use it's never lost any data. It autosaves, but you can force a save if you want. Second, it's always just there, at the edge of the screen. That means no switching, moving windows, whatever. It really does seem to be the fastest way to store and retrieve information I've found. Just one simple move of the mouse and the drawer slides smoothly out. And that smoothness seems to characterize sid—î…≥ot—î.
The design is beautifully simple. Add a note by clicking the + button. Delete it by clicking the x button. The action menu contains the several options, including facilities to change the colour of the note, rename it, export it, mail it and print it. You can also change the format of the text (although there's a separate text button for that too) and access the preferences dialogue here. The pop up menu show the title of all the notes. It's here that you'll find the 'manage notes' option, not in the action menu as the web site for sid—î…≥ot—î suggests. This enables you to sort the notes by colour, alphabetically or to drag them into any order you want. Alphabetically does it for me.
There is no menu for cutting and pasting, so use of the mouse or key combinations is needed. I can't make up my mind if that is a problem or not. I thought it might be at first, but now I never think about it. Sid—î…≥ot—î can be at the right or left of the screen and you can adjust the size. It works fine on a mac driving two screens too.
Sid—î…≥ot—î seems to handle text in different languages, keeping the diacritics intact. It also stores pictures and bookmarks.
There is also another use for sid—î…≥ot—î, as a programme launcher. As far as I can see this is undocumented. You can see in the screen shot that I have several music applications. If I want to use one I just click on it in sid—î…≥ot—î and it launches. All you need to do to use sid—î…≥ot—î as a launcher is to open the finder and drag the program to sid—î…≥ot—î. The icon then appears in sid—î…≥ot—î. But it gets even better. I have a lot of applications and I must admit I can't always remember what they do. So I can simply write underneath the icon a description of what the program does, what it's best for, etc. I've not come across a dedicated program launcher which allows you to do this.
So, a fantastic, versatile, program. Are there any problems with it? Well, I'd like to see a search field. It would fit so well in that space next to the button bar. I suppose having a thousand or so notes would make it less easy to use. But it's not really for that. It excels at storing snippets of text, code, etc. that you need close at hand all the time. But it also works well for copying bits of text from various sources before putting them all in another document. So it's also ideal as a temporary storage space. Just remember to delete it, or you'll end up with lots of notes you really don't need.
Manual
Brief, but you don't really need one. Just install it (drag it to the applications folder and don't forget to make it an item which loads when you log in - you'll like it that much)! Then just use it. But it would have been nice to know you can use it as a program launcher, it took me a while to discover that.
System Requirements
MAC OS 10.38 and above.
Price
Donationware - please do, this is a fabulous program.
The Dark Knowledge Bit
So, does this have anything to help us understand the idea of 'Dark Knowledge'? Did you wonder when you first heard of sid—î…≥ot—î if it was a program launcher? If you did not, then this is a nice example of 'Dark Knowledge'. You weren't even aware that sid—î…≥ot—î might be a program launcher, you hadn't considered it. You had no knowledge of this lack of knowledge in yourself.