Not everyone needs a juggernaut like DevonTHINK Professional to take notes and manage their information. Even mid-range PIMs like Yojimbo and SOHO Notes can be over-kill.

The right tool is often something small and lean, something like myNotes (or Sidenote or similar).

myNotes is a simple-to-use, efficient note manager with a few tricks up its sleeve.

Watching how cleverly it auto-titles notes makes me wonder why more apps don’t support this.

Getting stuff in and out is made easy by support for importing and exporting plain text, rich text format and Word documents.

myNotes also syncs notes with an iPod, so that you can take your notes with you.

Integration with other iApps means that emailing a note with Mail.app is just a right-click away:

It also talks to Address Book, so that right-clicking on a first or last name in a note, pops up email addresses, URLs and phone numbers for that person from Address Book:

URLs and email addresses are automatically hyperlinked although I had to add “mailto:” to my email addresses to get them to work).

Five built-in styles for printing notes and settings for the transparency, text colour and background of notes lets you customize the app’s output and work area “to suit your needs or moods.”

myNotes is shareware (USD 17.95). A demo is available from the developer’s web site .not apple mail, productivity, note-taking, note manager, address book, iPod

Notepad is a widget that takes the Sidenote idea to the Dashboard.

It is a note-taker with built-in searching, printing, resize features, iPod syncing, locking, lists and sketching.

It also comes with three nice skins:

The tickable lists obviously lend themselves to to-do lists. A drop-down list at the bottom of the widget offers quick access to all the notes, which can also be exported as text files.

For today only, you can get it for 38% off through MacUpdate’s new “MacZOT-like” cheap-for-a-day promotion .

Normally Notepad costs USD 7.95. For the next 17 hours or so you can get it for USD 4.95.

Notepad is a creation of the WidgetMachine .widget, dsahboard, note-taking, quick notes, to-dos, productivity, not apple mail