- When I close and re-open Stickies, it remembers what I had opened the last time. If I restart the application, or if I restart my computer, I don't need to remember what I was working on and reopen it manually; Stickies does that for me.
- It saves my changes automatically. In a world of multiple undo, not-saving-my-work isn't necessary as an undo technique -- it's more likely a technique for accidentally losing everything. Better to have everything saved all the time, and let me undo if I make a mistake.
(One obnoxious thing about Stickies: why, oh why, doesn't it have scrollbars? In 10.5 and earlier, I could add scrollbars to Stickies myself. In Snow Leopard, I can't.)
This is one of the great things about iPhone (and soon iPad) apps that most pundits, techies and competitors don't seem to understand. Almost every single (well made) app on the platform behaves this way. The complete state of the app is seamlessly preserved through deactivation, serialization, etc, without "Save" menu items or little 3.5" floppy disk toolbar icons.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet dollars to donuts this is both a result and a major cause of Apple's no-background-processes policy. Unlike any other computing environment I can think of, iPhone OS apps *don't have control* over when they are terminated... so developers quickly learn to minimize the user-visible side effects of termination as much as possible, and boom: new level of it-just-worksness.
Of course, there are other downsides in addition to the scrollbars. All those sticky notes ARE saved to a file, you're just never told where it is (by the app). I'm lucky HD sizes have been growing so fast that a backup disk image of my entire last (desktop) computer has fit easily onto my new laptop for almost a year... I actually discovered only a week or two ago that I'd failed to migrate MY stickies database when I made the switch! <:!