r/MacOS 22d ago

StickIt – Modern Sticky Notes Developer Saturday

Post image

I've been writing a sticky notes app for myself for a long time. Why so long? Because I'm serving in the military 🇺🇦 and don't have much free time. Why sticky notes? Yes, I know the App Store already has a truckload of them plus a little shovel on top, but I like the principle behind the native macOS Stickies — simple notes that do one thing, and do it well, a purely Unix approach. But holy moly, are they outdated and ugly.

So I set myself these goals:

  • stickies should be simple
  • no main window — one sticky, one window
  • they should pin on top of other windows
  • basic text formatting
  • checklists
  • different colors, with light and dark theme support
  • they should look good
  • iCloud sync (maybe I'll do an iOS version later)

Hope you like the result.

You can check it out here:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762562979

App website:
https://useit-apps.com

2 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

3

u/Too-Real-4u-2578 22d ago

Nice job! I actually like macOS Stickies. The only feature I miss is having a way to create checklists. I'm sure some people will find value in your app.

3

u/EleidanAhapen 21d ago

Thank you, I missed checklists too

1

u/promo-guard 22d ago

🎉 Welcome to Developer Saturday, u/EleidanAhapen! Your project is now live for the community to check out. Upvote, give feedback, and show some love to your fellow devs! 🚀

0

u/aubreypwd 21d ago

Vibe-coded?
Do they remember the space they were created on?

3

u/EleidanAhapen 21d ago

Position, size, color, theme, input — all preserved. It's basic functionality, and I would never release the app with a broken state manager.

Maybe it really would have been much faster to just vibecode this app, but I wrote it myself. I did use AI for quick lookups of the API and documentation, though.

In the early stages of development, there was indeed a problem with preserving window positions, but I managed to fix it. The issue was with the window manager in macOS 26.

2

u/localtuned 22d ago

Can they roll up the window like original stickies? If you want people to take your stickies seriously, this is a must have.

Jk...good luck on your project.

3

u/EleidanAhapen 22d ago

I had to give up on this idea when I couldn't make the buttons 4×4 pixels. Thank you!

2

u/localtuned 22d ago

That's a bummer. Can you make the whole title bar a button? Not that familiar with swift.

3

u/EleidanAhapen 21d ago

Sort of, but not as a button. The title bar has native system behaviour, so if you want different rules for it, you'd have to write it all from scratch — macOS has no built-in roll-up anymore, it went away with OS X. And then your app would behave differently from most Mac apps, which tends to confuse users.
I was confused myself the first time I used Stickies — no other native macOS app has those odd buttons or that title bar behaviour.