Actually what Gaberlunzie would kill and sacrifice his eye teeth for,  is a TextEdit that would automatically save and date the facts and graphics that he wants to get at later, without him having to title and save them.  He's sure it would be a quick alteration to this life-dominating programme,  allowing the Text bits to be automatically dated and saved.  That way instead of having to keep his Mac on or asleep all the time, for fear of loosing vital things, he could switch off, secure that all the information is there at need, duly dated and named too!

Stickies great advantage is its colour scheme, allowing you to work on various projects and then scoop those together. Gaberlunzie also admired the way he could reduce them to top one liners in a list. Google's lovely multiple notebooks do work the same way, but take longer to sort through. The List.it to Gaberlunzie at present looks like becoming his TO DO list, but he's really going to try it, after he's managed to catch up on and subdue TextEdit.

The goal of ‘Quickies’ however is much broader, aiming to bring one of the most useful inventions of the 20th century into the digital age: the ubiquitous sticky notes. ‘Quickies’ enriches the experience of using sticky notes by linking hand-written sticky-notes to the mobile phones, digital calendars, task-lists, e-mail and instant messaging clients.  By augmenting the familiar and ubiquitous physical sticky-note, ‘Quickies’ leverages existing patterns of behavior, merging paper-based sticky-note usage with the user's informational experience.

The project explores how the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), RFID, and ink recognition technologies can make it possible to create intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located, can send reminders and messages, and more broadly, can act as an I/O interface to the digital information world, 'know-it-all-bots' perhaps?

Digging out from piles of Post-its
MIT researchers, led by Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science David Karger, consider sticky notes ideal for certain problems, but think many of the tasks people use them for would be better handled by computer.

"I would never make the claim that we're trying to replace Post-its," says Michael Bernstein, a graduate student in Karger's lab, part of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "We want to understand the classes of things people do with Post-its and see if we can help users do more of what they wanted to do in the first place."

After studying how people keep track of their information scraps, the team has developed and tested a few different systems to help handle such odds and ends, from comprehensive programs that capture broad context for every scrap, to streamlined, web-based note-taking software.

In their 2007 study of personal information scraps, the team found scraps not only on sticky notes, but an array of other improvised tools - notebooks, whiteboards, text files, Internet bookmarks, and e-mails to oneself.

"We started out asking what people do with Post-it notes, and it spiraled into something much bigger - a study of how people intentionally misuse all of those systems that are supposed to help you," says Bernstein, who has worked closely with graduate student Max Van Kleek on the information scrap project.

In addition to to-do lists and phone numbers, the researchers found many other unique kinds of information, including fantasy football rosters, travel price comparisons, and a list of guitar chords.

Such information is difficult to capture because there are no specific computer applications designed to store them. Many people don't even use specific systems such as calendars and address books due to lack of what the researchers term "lightweight capture." If too much time and effort is required to store information, most people won't bother.

However, that means there is no easy way to find that phone number, recipe or other note to yourself when you need it. "You can't retrieve it on your computer if it never got put in," says Karger.

Jourknow
The group has explored a variety of tools aimed at increasing the flexibility and decreasing the burden of information capture. The first, called Jourknow, captured context every time the user made a note, such as where he was and what web site he was looking at. That feature saves the user the work of entering all that information, and the extra context makes it easier to find stored information later on, but all that extra work made the system too slow and complicated. 
http://pim2008.ethz.ch/papers/pim2008-bernstein-etal.pdf

Inky
A second effort, Inky, or Internet Keywords was co-developed with Robert Miller, the NBX Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and with graduate student Vikki Chou. Inky tried to "understand" the notes users were writing and automatically place them in the right applications, for example reserving a conference room on the lab's booking system when the user typed "meeting John 5pm."
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/inky/index.html

List-it
Most recently, the group has been developing a tool called list.it, which focuses entirely on minimising the time and effort needed to capture information. List.it is a simple web-browser-based note-taking tool that allows users to jot down short notes. Once the information is stored, it can be easily searched for later retrieval.

In a study to be presented at the CHI human-computer interaction conference next spring, the researchers found that list.it enabled users to quickly capture information and find it later. People who tested the system began to use list.it to store to-dos, appointments and other information that was previously never captured or had lived in other applications, due in part to the speed with which they could interact with the system.

"Even a simple text capture box and a text search box is well suited to a task that is both common and important: managing the small information scraps that fall between the cracks of traditional information management tools," the researchers concluded.

The researchers encourage interested users to try out list.it for themselves. The program can be downloaded at http://listit.csail.mit.edu

Ubiquitous interfaces & ubiquitous functionality
Hunting around to get the facts together, Gaberlunzie fell over Toolness.com which is working around the internet.

Web applications, blogs Atul Varma, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it’s difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox’s UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems.

The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don’t scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they’re running on; and Greasemonkey doesn’t prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

Our new project attempts to alleviate all of these problems by allowing end-users to apply textual commands, or verbs, to whatever they’re looking at. For instance, let’s assume that I’ve found a typo on a friend’s blog, and I want to let him know about it...well go see!
http://www.toolness.com/wp/?p=54


Sources: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/listit/
http://ambient.media.mit.edu/projects.php?action=details&id=16
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/techtalk-info.html