Shall I compare thee to a yellow sticky note?

Thou art more foreboding and less indicative of closure.

Rough winds do shake retail commerce before May

And downtime hath all too short a date.

Sometimes too excited the yellow sticky shines

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd

And sometimes when credit-cards decline

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

Thy momentary downtime does not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair new product;

Nor shall Apple introduce what wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou waitest;

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

Fair 3M's scrap of parchment shall cheer thee.

Thanks, verily, to all ye who have sent tidings of this news.

For anyone looking to get just a little bit more out of the Stickies app that Apple includes on every Mac, Stick Em Up by Jim McGowan might just be the app for you. Since he also writes Do It, the powerful todo list manager that we're a fan of, McGowan seems to have an eye for improving other apps and tasks that some of us perform on a daily basis. Basically speaking, Stick Em Up is a replacement for Apple's Stickies that offers one significant enhancement: categories. Notes can be grouped into whatever categories you'd like, which are all navigable by the keyboard and can all be effortlessly displayed and hidden. This allows all sorts of useful workflows to include Stick Em Up instead of having to look to another heftier note storage app like Yojimbo, or keeping multiple apps open just to get through the day. Users can create a category of Web Clippings stickies in which you can toss temporary URLs and images, but then hide that category at the end of the day and save room for all the other sticky notes you need to work with for another task. It's a subtle but liberating feature for a simple tool that offers a surprising amount of flexibility.

As with Do It and all his other software, Jim McGowan offers Stick Em Up as donationware from his site.

StickyBrain, one of the leading 'digital junk drawer' apps that recently entered a 4.1 beta testing phase, has been officially discontinued by Chronos in favor of SOHO Notes 5.5. Current registered users of StickyBrain 4.0 will receive an upgrade to SOHO Notes for free, while users who own licenses for any previous StickyBrain versions (1.x, 2.x and 3.x) can upgrade to SOHO Notes 5.5 for a mere $25, the price offered in the past for upgrading from StickyBrain 3.x to 4.x.

Why is StickyBrain being dissolved in favor of SOHO Notes, you ask? Chronos has published an announcement and FAQ explaining the decision, but here's the short version: SOHO Notes is basically the big brother of StickyBrain; they're almost the same app, derived from the same codebase, except SOHO Notes included three key features that Chronos used to charge extra for:

• SOHO Notes can synchronize notes between multiple computers using a .Mac account (seamlessly, in the background).
  
• SOHO Notes can access multiple note databases simultaneously.
• SOHO Notes is multi-user capable which means users can share notes with others over a network using the product's client/server technology.

Now, with SOHO Notes taking the helm, its price has dropped to $39.99 to keep it more in-line with StickyBrain's previous price, as well as the competition like Yojimbo and DEVONthink.

Feature-wise, this new version of SOHO Notes 5.5 offers some powerful new goodies, such as the ability to import and catalog almost any kind of file, send notes to your blog, a DockNote that makes it easy to get info both in and out, audio recording notes, full-screen editing of notes, a Daily Journal/Diary category that can automatically date/time stamp notes and much more.

Whether you love your hate StickyBrain SOHO Notes, this should be good news for the 'digital junk drawer' market, as this price drop and the new features should help keep everyone's innovative juices flowing.

Sticky notes are great, but sticky notes that can have reminder alarms, be sent to other Macs via Bonjour, sent over the web and SMS, archived and more - are better. If any of these features have your inner nerd excited, then check out iSticky - a sticky note app on steroids. Also on the feature list are themes, categories, encryption, document linking and more.

While we don't think iSticky is Universal yet (at least, the author isn't bragging about it on the site), a demo is available. iSticky also offers a wide range of licenses depending on which features you need and whether you need a family/business pack. Prices run from $16 USD (single license, Bonjour sending but not over the web) up to $90 USD for a 12 license pack with all the toppings. Check it out if Apple's Stickies just aren't cutting it for you anymore.