Every day we are faced with various situations, tasks or other problems that can keep our minds busy. At home or at work things can get hectic and we often find ourselves surrounded by tons of information that we need to remember at a given time. That’s where those brightly colored sticky notes come in handy, but, on occasion, they tend to overcrowd our desks.

PNotes is a useful program that can help you organize your tasks and never forget those important things you have to do, like attend a meeting, remember someone's birthday, schedule your appointments, etc.

The application is open source, distributed under the GPL v2 license, is very small, occupying only 750 KB on your hard drive, and it can be started directly from the extracted folder thus also being a portable tool for you to take on your trips and forget about all those bits of paper with small writing that even you can't decipher.

The first time you run PNotes a “sticky note” will appear on your desktop, similar to the ones you regularly use at the office or at home. You can quickly create your first note by writing the desired text you wish to remember later on. The advantage is that you can adjust and format your text using the small buttons at the bottom of the note according to your needs. They allow you to set up the font, font size, font color, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, text alignment and even add bullets to your sticky note.

The interface is very simple and intuitive, PNotes sitting comfortably in the system tray; just right click it and the main menu will pop up. It will help you access all the features of the application in a second, allowing you to add new notes or load previously saved ones, show or hide different note groups, easily select the docking method for all the notes, search through your notes for keywords, and even replace them all with a single click on the desired option.

By accessing the Control Panel of PNotes you will be able to further manage, schedule and organize your notes. It's an explorer-like window that will allow you to quickly view all the notes, edit and categorize them. You can create different categories for different types of notes; for example, you can create a category for all of your friends’ birthdays or a different one only for work-related notes and so on. If a category gets too crowded you can always create new subcategories that will help you keep track of related notes and for an easier management of your tasks.

You can delete your notes or entire categories with a simple drag and drop on the Recycle Bin tab. If you deleted important notes by mistake or just want to restore them you can simply press the Restore Note button and the selected item will be back where it was before deletion.

The application also provides you with a search option that will help you look for the desired notes faster. From this window you will be able to search for a specific word or phrase and replace it with the desired text. Your search results will be displayed at the bottom of this window, showing all the notes that contain the given words. If you want to view a specific note you can double click it and it will pop up in a jiffy.

With PNotes you can send your notes by email or as an attachment to an email with the push of a button. The program will open your default email client and enter your note as a text message or attach it to an empty message.

Finally the Preferences window allows you to edit various features of the application. From the Appearance tab you can enable or disable the transparency effect of the notes window, hide the toolbar from the bottom of your notes, use custom fonts and select to display or not a scrollbar on each note for an easier reading.

PNotes is skinable, allowing you to change the default skin of the notes with various custom-made alternatives. From the Skins tab of the Preferences window you will be able to choose the desired skin for your notes or you can change the settings for the skinless notes by tweaking the width and height but also the background color and caption font.

The Schedule tab allows you to enable sound alerts and visual notifications whenever a task was scheduled to start. You can select your favorite alarm sound (the application supports only WAV files) and set up the way PNotes should display date and time.

The Docking options enable you to set up the way PNotes will display your notes when in docking mode. You can select a custom skin, custom size, colors and caption font. Arriving to the Behavior tab we notice some useful features that will spare you some time. First you can allow the program to save all your notes automatically on program exit, with or without confirmation, and enable it to ask or not for confirmation before you delete a note. Also, you can enable the Autosave option, which will automatically save your notes at a given time interval.

To make your work easier you can assign various hotkeys for almost all the features of PNotes; just select the feature and the desired key combination. Finally from the Misc tab you can set up miscellaneous options of PNotes, like autorun on system start, show control panel on program start and check for updates. You will also be able to select a preferred browser if you don't want PNotes to use the default one; just enter the path to the desired one.

The Good

The application handles your notes with ease, allowing you to categorize them for better access and use. You can also schedule your notes to be displayed at a given time and even create favorite ones to quickly access them.

PNotes makes use of hotkeys, an option that will speed up your work and enable you to access various features with a simple key combination.

The Bad

Some minor additions could become useful: explanations of the options in the Preferences window, better management of your favorite notes and the ability to restore multiple notes at once.

The Truth

PNotes does its job in a simple way and could be the tool that can help you get rid of those sticky notes that can overcrowd your desk.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: