Originally downloaded 7/19/06. Edgies remind me of Sticky Windows or, more recently, iXiu. However, unlike either of those, (iXiu isn’t released yet), Edgies is freeware, which makes it much more interesting. The other thing Edgies reminds me of is the way I used to use Drag Thing, with small, colorful tabs along the edge of the screen. Edgies can apparently hold anything a Sticky can, and will accept items dragged to them from other apps. Could be very cool indeed!
Update 10/14/06. Edgies is now $10 shareware.
Update 12/9/06. This latest version of Edgies is the real thing. It has now become a seriously great Mac OS X application that is well worth the money. It’s the best “edge of the screen” software I’ve ever tried and has customization options that will delight and surprise you. Unlike some earlier versions, this latest (1.1 beta 5.3) is stable and reliable. I guarantee that Edgies will teach you new ways of using your Mac and demonstrate once again that Mac developers are making the best and most exciting personal-use software on the planet. (I’ve added a screen movie at the end of the review, as well as a screenshot of the Edgies “memo list” window, which lets you manage your Edgies is a typical Cocoa word-processor mode, like TextEdit.)
Lest my rave leads you to think I believe Edgies is perfect, here’s my brief list of pros/cons notes on it. As you’ll see, there’s plenty of room to improve. But then, isn’t that true of just about everything?
Pros
Cons
Very cool concept
Lot of flexibility in setting up and managing edgies
List view shows all “memos”, which comes with a search field.
Edgies can store many kinds of data and file types.
Support for checklists.
Persistent presence without opening a separate application.
Several novel features such as balloon preview and tear-off notes.
It’s easy to move edgies around on the edge, or to move them from one edge to another.
New feature lets edgies automatically arrange themselves in an overlapping, tab-like manner. You have some customizing options for this, too.
Edgies provides an application service, and you can save selected text to make a new memo. In this case, text formatting from the source app is preserved (mostly… Edgies gets some stuff wrong. In my case, it boldfaced everything, when I had just set a heading bold. Note that in this case (imported text), I was able to set text attributes in the Edgy memo.)
Edgies provides a “Memo List” window that has some surprisingly powerful features. Not only can you set or change meta data here (including the edgie’s color), but you can search your edgies and, best of all, use the Cocoa ruler in a given note. The ruler gives you access to all your text styles and list options. It’s almost as good as working directly in TextEdit! The Memo List is a great way of organizing and managing some of your more — er — complex edgies.
You can customize sounds to correspond with different Edgies events (but Edgies doesn’t provide any)
You can customize keyboard shortcuts for most Edgies functions
You can make new memos by dragging text, files, or images to the screen edge (this is configurable). If you drag a non-text, non-image file, Edgies will either embed the file in the memo or add a link. You can also drag URLs to Edgies to make bookmarks, etc.
For images, Edgies provides a couple of basic options: scale, rotate
You can add and manage checkboxes to any Edgie, making them do double-duty as to-do lists. And guess what! The checkboxes can be customized by color!
Edgies doesn’t provide an option for using a menubar item.
Export options limited to RTFD; however, Edgies provides a quick export feature that lets you save to a specified folder without dialog.
Can’t set default text color, which means using dark tab colors isn’t an option.
Edgies are somewhat slow to start up.
In latest build, I had trouble getting Edgies to eliminate the Dock icon. It turns out that Edgies needs to be in the main Applications folder for this to work.
Sometimes I couldn’t get Edgies to set font attributes (size, bold) or styles. It would set an underline, but that was it.
Edgies seems to forget its transparency settings for notes etc. Difficult to get settings correct. (That problem was caused by my use of SetAlphaValue, a cool Cocoa InputManager that lets you customize transparency settings in any Cocoa app. It was conflicting with Edgies’ own transparency settings…)
When making a new memo from the application service, Edgies seemed to forget it was supposed to stay “floating”. All other memos but the current one were hidden, and I couldn’t access them. Eventually, the other memos showed up, but it took time.
In the latest build, the memo list was unresponsive to mouse click… I couldn’t select any of the memos, and they didn’t display even when I used the “display” checkbox.Update: This problem apparently results from a conflict with OpenMenu, which I’m also testing. When I disabled OpenMenu in Edgies, the Memo List worked great.
Your support for this website is much appreciated! I really want to keep Mars free of advertising clutter, so your contributions are the only source of funding. Keep Mars ad-free!
Originally downloaded 7/19/06. Edgies remind me of Sticky Windows or, more recently, iXiu. However, unlike either of those, (iXiu isn’t released yet), Edgies is freeware, which makes it much more interesting. The other thing Edgies reminds me of is the way I used to use Drag Thing, with small, colorful tabs along the edge of the screen. Edgies can apparently hold anything a Sticky can, and will accept items dragged to them from other apps. Could be very cool indeed!
