A couple of times a year it seems, I rediscover some stock app that ships with my Mac. A few weeks ago, it was Stickies. No one seems to talk about Stickies much, but here's all you need or want to know.

Despite all the great note-taking and text-based apps I use on my Mac, there's been a void for the kind of text that seems more suited for a real world sticky note. That is, only-important-right-now text that doesn't need to be stored.

A typical use case for me: Capturing a few lines of an email where someone is asking me a question that requires me to dig into PDFs to answer. Before I rediscovered Stickies, I was constantly flipping between my email window and stacks of PDFs. With Stickies, I can capture the text with a quick ⌘⇧Y and make the resulting sticky note float over all other windows. It may seem like a trivial problem to solve, but when trivial problems occur a few hundred times a year (at least), they are not trivial in total.

Until computer screens are as big as physical desktops, there will be a constant need to have a tiny bit of text floating over other app windows. Stickies.app, which still comes with OS X as of Yosemite, does it perfectly.