Minipad2 is a tabbed, lightweight and portable – 305KB download – single executable that can be used as an text editor, note taker, calculator, dictionary and memo or reminder (tray popup without sound) program.
It is also capable of watching the clipboard and inserting pre-defined text such as time, date, separator and signature – which can be defined via the Tools—>Edit Template menu. New tabs can be created for separate notes and aforementioned included functions. The features such as the calculator, memo and dictionary are available via typing and following a certain format. For example a memo or alarm can be set by typing
@m1, 15 9:00, write report
and pressing enter, this translates into a popup reminder every first and 15th of the month at 9AM with the text ‘write report’ (see images for two more examples).
Other examples and syntax are given in the accompanying help file. Search and replace is also available but in my testing the search only worked on the current visible tab and not all text stored across the many tabs I had open. Another feature of minipad2 is called Special Effect. Effects can be enabled under the Options menu and chosen in Options—>Preferences. The two main effects available are auto scroll and auto hide. The auto scroll rolls up the window leaving only minipad2’s title bar intact. Auto hide, which didn’t perform as expected in my testing and usage, hides the window when focus is off minipad2, much like the feature available with Windows’ taskbar. But as mentioned, in my testing the minipad2 window seemed to want to hide – the animated effect hovered over my monitor – but the minipad2 window didn’t actually go away.
To use the dictionary one or more chosen languages must be added via the Preferences menu after they have been downloaded separately. Currently Chinese, Spanish, French, German and Japanese are available.
A very interesting application with a couple of unusual features and different ways of doing things. Minipad2 is a single executable that after hours of being used and tested remained under 10MB of RAM usage. Minipad2 is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista.