As a non-fiction author, I do a great deal of internet research. As a football coach, I do a great deal of research, period. When these two things bang together on my desktop, I'm left with clutter. At last count I have thirteen filled spiral notebooks with clinic notes.

Stickies are worthless to me. They don't carry enough information (about sixteen lines is the max), and the database is difficult to locate, so if you use the widgets stickies like I did, you need to have a dozen or more open (which completely covers your widgets desktop and makes other applications unusable) and if you have a system crash, any information on those stickies is pretty much gone. (Just happened to me about a week ago.)

Sidenote, on the other hand, is EXACTLY the sort of documentation tool every author should have. It's completely unobtrusive-- hidden nicely on the right side of my desktop-- yet it can have dozens of notes available. At the moment I have five notes open: a general one for quick jots like phone numbers when conducting business, book titles I'm interested in looking for, etc; One for each book remaining in my football-coaching series that are labeled volume three, four, and Art of Coaching Football; and a grocery list!

I have it linked to a command button I rarely use (command-option-O), and when I need it, it's there! When I don't, I forget it's there! This is the best kind of utility.

There are, however, two things I would like to see changed for the future:

1) A reliable autosave that should be triggered whenever the drawer closes and saves across all notes. Immediately after I downloaded and set up this software (and fell in love with it) I had a physical problem with my laptop hard drive that caused me to need to reinstall the OS. While I was able to save my previous systems and recover almost everything, since I had not saved within the application and can't find the stickies database, I may be out several months of jotted research. (I'm blase' about it only on the surface.) An autosave would make life much easier for the user.

2) The second thing that would make this even more perfect is a search engine that searches across all open notes. This might be too difficult to add to a program of such small size, but sometimes notes can be cross volume in nature. Any discussion of football offenses, for example, should include a basic framework of football DEFENSE to give the reader a common framework with the author. The fact that Sidenote has a search engine in the notes is GREAT (I can't stress this enough for how important it is to someone researching for writing purposes! Get this for your kids to use on their next term paper!), but a cross-note search engine would save the user much time and effort.

This is secondary, however, compared to the REALLY important thing that I think needs to be added: the autosave feature. (Remember to save your note every time you close the drawer, folks!)

As far as a simple organizational device, however, this has my vote for the best software I've downloaded yet. I can't believe that it was free (I encourage everyone to donate to the developer!), and yet saves me so much time.

The only thing I give this a four stars on is quality/stability, and ONLY because of the lack of an autosave feature. Other than that, this is a perfect five stars!

~D.