A reader (hi Jonathan!) emailed me last week to let me know about a new, free, little snippet-keeping app he’d stumbled upon.

It’s called Sidenote and it looks like this when it’s running:

Sidenote sits at the side of your screen and neatly hides itself away when not in use. Wave your pointer in its direction and it pops out again. You can do all the things you’d expect to do in a note-taking app; use rich text, drag images into notes, and so on.

The app has a professional feel to it and does everything its maker claims. At the moment, it’s a mouse-oriented utility and offers little in the way of keyboard control, which means I can’t bring myself to put it to use yet. Some people might not find that a problem though; if you tend to drag chunks of text or images from web pages or other documents, Sidenote’s simplicity may well appeal.

Notes are autosaved, too, which makes it a handy thing to have around for the terminally forgetful.

My only complaint is that switching from one note to another is currently only possible via a drop-down menu; this might get unwieldy if the number of notes gets larger than a dozen or so.

Hopefully future versions will include some options for keyboard control, and an alternative approach to note-switching. In the meantime, try it out and see what you think.

Update: Shortly after I posted this, I got the following email from Pierre Chatal, Sidenote creator:

I’m happy to let you know that a new version has been issued and there’s system-wide hotkeys to create, close and navigate between notes and manipulating the drawer!

Great news, and thanks Pierre.

What’s your favorite snippet keeper?