How To Use A Paperclip And Post It Notes On A Mac.

Without question, your Mac can be the digital hub of your digital life. It’s chic. It’s modern. It has personality. It just works. Right?

Not so fast. For many Mac users, their computer would work better if software were not so difficult to use. These days, even Mac software is complex and most utilities still don’t work the way humans work.

Maybe computers will rule the world one day, but for now, we devote plenty of effort getting our computers to do what we want in a way that suits us, not the other way around.

Enter the paperclip and 3M’s clever and ubiquitous Post-it Notes. The paperclip has been around for just a few years less than forever. By comparison, Post-it Notes could be considered modern technology, though I suppose paper to-do notes have been around as long as paper.

Take a modern-day Mac-oriented Paperclip and the modern day Mac Stickies in OS X and put them together. They’re like peanut butter and jelly. Like Bogie and Bacall. Like Ozzie and Harriet. Like Warren and Annete, or Will and Jada, or Homer and Marge. They’re made for each.

Paperclip is a clever little utility from From Concentrate Software (makes you think of an orange grove, right?) which does one thing very well.

It lets you attach your Mac’s Stickies to a document.

This is one of those nifty little Mac utilities which kinda sorta works the way humans were meant to work—with paperclips and Post-it Notes, except now it’s in digital form. Your Mac’s documents get a Stickie stuck to it with your notes. How cool is that?

This is the kind of utility which is perfect for Mac users who find most of the Mac note-taking and organizational and To-Do List applications much too complex to use effectively. After all, how much discipline does it take to use a Post-it Note and a paperclip?

The digital version, Paperclip, is almost as easy. Papercllp resides as a Menu Bar selection. Open a document, then select Attach Note from the Paperclip menu. Immediately, a little Stickies-like note pops up to the right side of the document.

Paperclip’s version of the Stickies note is also an improvement. Notes are stored as RTFD files which means you can change the text, the fonts, even drop images and include links in the note.

Say goodbye to Marker Felt font, folks.

How easy is that? The 30 day free trial period for Paperclip will give you an idea of how well you can fit the digital version of paperclips and Post-it Notes into your daily routine.

Trust me. It won’t take you long to get the hang of it.

You can stretch Paperclip’s notes, add graphics, change text. It even includes scroll bars for notes with lots of text. Attach the note to your document and when you open it again, the note pops up to remind you of whatever needs reminding.

That’s not only unique, it’s handy, and it’s easy to implement without much instruction. The only downside is that the notes you create for a document do not follow the document when you send it to someone else. It’s basically a Paperclip notes, Stickies, Post-it Note, utility that works for you on your Mac.

Add a transferable notes feature to Paperclip and you’ve got something really worthwhile. As it is, Paperclip is good for you if you don’t like clutter and you love simplicity.