OurStickys for Chrome

Although the Chrome Web Store is oversaturated with note-taking extensions, we stumbled upon a particular tool that stands out in the crowd: OurStickys. The main difference between it and other similar software is that notes and their position are remembered by the web browser, so they can be found exactly where you left them the next time you visit those pages.

It's easy to write notes and to customize them since the appearance and options are familiar; those who've worked with note-taking tools before can definitely relate to OurStickys' approach. Stickys can be added from the right-click menu opened anywhere in a Chrome pages as well as dragged and dropped to change their position.

Text formatting options are scarce, though, so it's not possible to make text bold, for example. On the bright side, you drag and drop selected text from external applications, add tags to find stickys later from the main menu of the extension, as well as create hyperlinks (CTRL + click links to open the pages).

You can increase the font size, modify the theme color, stick the note to the exact or fuzzy page, path, domain or every tab, as well as add an expiration date so that notes automatically disappear after a specified time (1 day, 1 week or 1 month). All words and characters are counted.

Also, you can turn the regular sticky notes into a to-do list in order to display checkboxes next to each paragraph and mark them as completed by ticking boxes to apply strikethrough to the whole paragraph. The other alternative is to make the note play small, embedded YouTube videos after pasting a YouTube link and switching to video sticky type.

Your entire collection of stickys from all sources can be viewed from the main menu. If you add multiple stickys to the same page, you can take a look at the extension's icon next to the address bar to find out how many notes are there. The utility displays indicators next to the scrollbar that jump to a specific note on click.

Although this may already sound intuitive, it's important to mention that you have to log in with a Google or Facebook account in order to store all your personal data, sync it across all devices and access it from anywhere using your account.

The sharing system provided by OurStickys works by creating channels (each has a unique channel code) and sharing channel codes with other OurSticky users, which can subscribe to your channels. Afterward, you can effortlessly share stickys via channels. In addition to your collection of stickys, you can view all shared notes and channels from the main menu.

The default settings related to note appearance can be configured from this area too. You can enable advanced settings in order to create JSON stickys and password-protect notes.

We haven't experienced any compatibility issues with the latest Chrome version in our tests. Unfortunately, the extension doesn't support dynamic pages, such as those from the Chrome Web Store.

All aspects considered, OurStickys is an impressive tool whose rich features make it hard to believe that it's just a Chrome extension. We're looking forward to new features (particularly support for dynamic pages) as well as integration with other web browsers, especially Firefox.