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Scribblet: menubar scratchpad

by Mat Lu Jul 3rd 2008 at 12:00PM



I often find myself in need of a the digital equivalent of a scratch pad: just an open text-field to jot down a phone number, save some text for a blog comment, etc. These are not really things I want to save, so I don't want to open a word processor or even use the snippet manager of my choice (Yojimbo). So Scribblet appeals to me in its focus on one basic task. (I've never been a fan of Stickies.)

It's a menubar application that does one simple thing: pop up a small notepad; that's it. It doesn't allow for multiple notes or snippet management. It's simply a scratch pad that pops up with a simple click on the menubar or by hitting a user-definable hotkey. Despite, or rather because of, its simplicity I find it quite handy and it has earned a spot on my menubar.

Scribblet is a free download from not salad.

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I often find myself in need of a the digital equivalent of a scratch pad: just an open text-field to jot down a phone number, save some...
 

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lok cheung

how about the good old Stickies.app? one click away (if you put it on the dock), always on, no save file needed, little system resources needed, clever and smart. i love to put them on my screen with different colours.

July 04 2008 at 1:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Blogmaniac

Try http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/jotter.html
Accessible from the menubar. Autosaves.
Best. Scratchpad. Period.


July 04 2008 at 4:12 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
samu

Neither of my keyboards has the ‘ key, and only the modifier for the hotkey can be customised, so this is a total non-starter for me, sadly.

July 04 2008 at 1:37 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to samu's comment
Jon

Hi samu,

I'm the developer of Scribblet. I realise I'm a little late to the party... but I just wanted to let you know that you should be able to customise the actual shortcut key, as well as the modifier.

Simply select the modifier from the four available (e.g. Shift), and press any key on your keyboard. I'm yet to receive a bug report relating to this, so please do let me know if you're having any problems.

Cheers,
Jon

July 09 2008 at 4:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
James

@mark...

"Because you don't have to hit save?"

cmd-s, cmd-x - how hard? Fingers never leave the keyboard. As for keeping track... give them sensible names when saving. Ok, I can appreciate why some might like a menu-bar app... can't you appreciate that it actually doesn't add a lot of value?

July 03 2008 at 6:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
delight1

i tend to use Notational Velocity for my snippets.
http://notational.net/

July 03 2008 at 5:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Alex

Nice. I use Sidenote, though. It's great, go check it out: http://www.chatelp.org/?page_id=5

July 03 2008 at 1:41 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Matias Canelson

Just add a "Sticky Note Widget" to the dashboard.

July 03 2008 at 1:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
julian

uh... why not just use a widget all you do is go to a corner or push the dashboard key
then type away on a sticky? ... or the new islayer organizer bar?
complicating yourselves ... and cluttering the bar

July 03 2008 at 1:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kev Orng

I'll give it a go but I'm not confident.
I've been looking for the perfect scratchpad app for ten years, but I always revert back to this: http://tinyurl.com/3m2xrc

Although lately, I've been leaving a new Mail composition open all day, into which I copy and paste URLS and more complex things. Then at the end of the day I hit send and it goes to my infinitely searchable gmail account which I only use for notes and for signing into blogs. Since I rarely use the gmail account for anything else, I don't feel my regular inbox is cluttered with notes from myself.

July 03 2008 at 1:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David Macdonald

If you use the Dashboard you might want to look at SecretNotePadPlus. I use it to take littles notes when I'm on the phone, etc. It's also tied to KeyChain Access so you secure any notes if necessary.

See http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/business/secretnotepadplus.html

July 03 2008 at 12:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to David Macdonald's comment
Pepe

You know, Dashboard just doesn't work for me. It (well some of the interneted apps in it) takes way too long to load.

July 03 2008 at 2:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
dustin

For the Dashboard Problem consider Dashboard KickStart (http://www.alwintroost.nl/?id=40). I used to never use Dashboard for a similar reason but this will kind of curb the waiting time for me.

Cheers!

July 07 2008 at 1:09 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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