Here’s a simple tip for those of you who rely on Stickies as a catch-all for reminders, to-dos, and other bits of trivia (text or graphics) that you like to keep handy. You’re probably aware that Stickies supports embedded URLs from Web browsers (Safari and Firefox, at least). Just drag and drop a URL into Stickies, and it turns into a clickable link. While bookmkarks are a great way to keep track of sites within your browser, I occasionally use Stickies as a holding spot for lists of URLs that I need to reference in an article, for example.
Did you know, though, that Stickies also supports clickable links from Mail? Just drag any message out of Mail, and then drop the dragged message on a note in Stickies, and you’ll have an instant link to that message. So if you’ve got an e-mail that you’d like associated with some text on a note in Stickies, all you need to do is drag-and-drop, and you’ll have a link to the source e-mail. In my testing, this link worked even after moving a message from my inbox to one of the folders in the On My Mac section of Mail’s sidebar.
You might think you can use the same trick to link to an iCal event, but you can’t—if you drag-and-drop an iCal event, you’ll get a nice event summary, but no link to the original event. Still, the ability to store links to both Web sites and e-mail messages makes Stickies even more useful as a catch-all application for storing random bits of data.