Note Mania: excellent sticky note app with unique features

During the summer I proclaimed Stickies to be one of the best sticky note application out there; and the praise for Stickies is well deserved considering how feature filled and easy to use it is (I especially like the ability of Stickies to share notes over a network). Note Mania is another sticky note app which is very similar to Stickies, yet different enough to write about (read on if you are curious).

Note Mania has all of the norm features one expects in a sticky note application…

Create unlimited sticky notes easily (via system tray icon or hotkey)
Add alarms (option to set reoccurring alarms) to each individual sticky note
Edit the cosmetics of each note (color, font, opacity, etc.)
Easily duplicate notes
All notes snap to each other for easily alignment
Set sticky notes to either float on desktop or “stay on top” of all windows
Show/hide notes at will
Unicode support

…but also has nice “extra” features you are not likely to find with other sticky note applications:

Ability to view and manage all notes in a “pad” window

Can read RSS feeds

Clicking on the browser icon (Firefox in my case) opens the link displayed in the feed in your internet browser.

Has a built in calendar

You can add notes to each date.

Can schedule websites or files to launch automatically;

You can launch many different things including a file, program, URL, e-mail or even another note.

New notes automatically display the content of Windows Clipboard

All the above features done in a very computer resource efficient manner: 2-5 MB of RAM usage varying on if the program is idle or if you are actively using it (less than 1 MB of RAM while idle if you allow CleanMem to do its thing).

However, there are two user-friendly features which I think the developer should consider adding…

The ability to “lock” notes in place. I find often times I may accidentally click + drag and move notes around.
The ability to select multiple notes and move them all at once as a “group” instead of having to moving them all individually.

…and there are three improvements to existing features which I think the developer shoulder consider making:

Adding RSS feeds to Note Mania is tricky. You have to first add them through your internet browser then configure it through Note Mania:

If your web browser is Internet Explorer, feeds you subscribe (in the root folder only) using the browser are automatically available in Note Mania too. You can just open Note Mania’s Preferences dialog and configure your note feeds.

If your web browser is Firefox, when you subscribe to a feed, select Choose Application… then “feedmania.exe”, which is in the folder Note Mania is installed. The feed will then be available for you to configure in Note Mania’s Preferences dialog.

I believe the Note Mania feature would be a lot more easier to use if the process of adding RSS feeds was more in house.

Make the alarm system more “powerful”. As it stands, the “alarm” just rings/beeps/plays (depending on what sound you have selected – only .WAV is supported) for a few seconds then turns off. There is no snooze or ability to set how long the alarm plays or an alarm reminder in writing. The developer may just want to consider separating the “alarm feature” from the “schedule” feature (currently to create an alarm you must “schedule” a note) so the user has more options to work with.

When reading an RSS feed, organize the notes created by the RSS feed automatically. The screen of the RSS feed you see above is how it looks after I organized it. Initially it looked like this:

All things considered, however, Note Mania is an excellent sticky notes application. Now is it “better” than Stickies? No. However Stickies is not “better” than Note Mania either. While they both have overlapping features, they both also have distinct unique features which will help you decide if you want to use Note Mania or Stickies. Here is a quick comparison of the major differences: