Post-It Note Jaguar

I wonder if Michael's passing along a pointer to this Post-It Jaguar is a hint that his lovely new non-hybrid wants a little accessorizing.

Dan's gravity-defying page corners

Our crafty designer Dan Cederholm (the pixel-talent behind Rollyo, Odeo, and other things ending in "eeyo") contributes the 24th installment of 24 ways, a web design advent calendar chock full of
CSS, JavaScript, API, Ajax, and other webilicious stocking stuffers. Dan's Gravity-Defying Page Corners came to him while working on the next generation UI for Stikkit future.

Oh, and it's written as a poem, no less.

"So on the night before Christmas all through your house, get your page curling by stirring your mouse."

Stikkit on your desktop

We're always thinking about ways to keep Stikkit close at hand. Assuming you do too ;-), I thought I'd point to a couple of little apps we've come across to do just that.

Steven Frank's lovely little WebKit-based WebDesktop for Mac OS X overlays Stikkit (or any other site for that matter) on your desktop, leaving it dimmed until you start interacting with it. An auto-refresh setting means fresh content shows up without need of a manual reload.

And Stikkiteer bmassey finds Bubbles, a system-tray enhancement for Windows, a perfect way to keep a logged-in instance of Stikkit at hand.

Have a Stikkit hack to share? Pop in to the "Widgets, Hacks, and more" forum and let us know.

"Suffiently advanced technology."

In my copious free time :-\ between growing a new company and building a new product, I continue to chair the program for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

This year's theme is "Sufficiently advanced technology", in reference to Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In 2007, we expect Internet access to be instant, music collections to fit into our pockets, and communication to be constant no matter where we are. Technology is tightly woven into our lives; so well-integrated at times we scarcely notice it. And yet, there are innovators, hackers, and thinkers in our midst plotting revolutions -- in some cases, simply by reexamining the assumptions underlying the technology we take for granted today. We'll be examining those technologies that have silently slipped into the realm of magic (Did anyone notice that the dream of ubiquitous wifi access actually happened?) as well as those on the verge of doing so (Wii, anyone?).

Registration just opened and I encourage you to sign up as soon as you can as last year sold out rather quickly and this year's going to be better still ;-).

Salutations, gentle stikkiteers.

Today's build of Stikkit brings a couple-three enhancements we thought you'd like to know about.

• Stikkit salutations mean Stikkit will only respond when spoken to.


• A new "magic words" cheatsheet is just a click away.


• Streamlined signup brings immediate gratification: sign up and get sticking in mere seconds (without need of first confirming your email address).

(Feel free to skip the nitty-gritty and watch Stikkit salutations in action.)

Stikkit salutations

Our team is constantly improving and tweaking the Stikkit "magic word" parser: the machinery tasked with picking events, to-dos, peeps, bookmarks, tags, sharing, and more out of your stikkits and doing something useful with them. The key is being smart (doing only the right thing, otherwise keeping out of the way), not clever (thinking we know what you mean and stepping on your toes).

This is decidedly not artificial intelligence: Stikkit relies upon your actual intelligence, providing a pidgin — a simplified language with rudimentary grammar and vocabulary (what we call "magic words") — that's easy for you to remember and Stikkit to understand.

There are times, though, when you'd like Stikkit to stop listening. To turn Stikkit's parser off, simply prepend your stikkit with !! and it'll completely ignore any magic words in your note. Or you can point out particular paragraphs or words for Stikkit to ignore using !, as in "! Can't touch this." or "Please don't !share with rael." (Stikkit thoughtfully hides these exclamation marks when displaying your stikkit.)

But what if you want Stikkit to only respond when spoken to?

A new feature we're calling "Stikkit salutations" does just the trick. Prepend any line or paragraph with Stikkit, and Stikkit will start paying attention (until the end of the paragraph, i.e. next blank line). The rest of your stikkit is completely ignored. This is especially useful when you're pasting in extended notes for a meeting and only want Stikkit to notice the date and time for the meeting itself. Or when forwarding an email message to Stikkit, you can safely call out a line or three without having to chop out what you don't want Stikkit to misconstrue.

Here's an example of Stikkit salutations in action:

Marketing Meeting

stikkit, schedule a meeting on January 20th at 4pm.

We'll be talking about the marketing materials deadline of March 8th.

stikkit, share with susan@example.valuesofn.com

Forwarded email message:

> To: jj@example.valuesofn.com
> From: olivia@example.valuesofn.com
> Subject: Marketing materials deadline
>
> JJ-
> Let's meet about that marketing materials deadline.
> -O

Stikkit salutations come in four delicious syntactic flavors (I'm partial to the third):

stikkit,
stikkit:
s,
s:

Of course if you don't use any salutations, Stikkit does what it has always done and pays attention to the entire stikkit.

"Magic words" cheat-sheet

While there's really not much you have to remember when using Stikkit, we thought a cheat-sheet would come in handy. Click the help link at the top of any Stikkit window and it'll pop right up. (Thanks for the suggestion, Ev.)

Streamlined signup

In the course of our Stikkit home page redesign it turns out we left out one seemingly-innocuous yet forehead-smackingly obvious UI element: on-screen signup confirmation :-\.

Most of you were nice enough to assume you'd just missed a pop-up and happily clicked the the emailed link, leaving you signed in and none the worse for wear. But we were beginning to wonder about the few who took the time to sign up never to be heard from again.

We took the opportunity to not only repair the bug but completely rework and streamline Stikkit signup. New signups can now dive right in and start sticking stikkits without need of first visiting their email inboxes. The only restrictions on what you can do before email verification — necessary to prevent misuse — are that you can't share, set reminders, or log back in should you log out. These restrictions are instantly waived the moment you click the emailed link and log in.

We always appreciate hearing what's working for you and what's not behaving as expected, what you'd like to see in Stikkit, how you're using it, and anything else that's on your mind. Please do pop by our forums and get involved in the ongoing discussion and future direction of Stikkit.

net@nite: "The people behind Stikkit"

I had the pleasure of hanging out (virtually, at least) and chatting with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte on their weekly podcast net@nite. Uber-organizer and pal Merlin Mann was kind enough to demo Stikkit on a forthcoming episode of Leo's Call for Help show and they were taken with it enough to invite me to chat about some of the ideas behind our work.

You can listen to the podcast at TalkShoe (Episode 7: "iPhone?"; I pop on at time index 27:47).

Your actual interface may vary

When the UI's this good the product itself doesn't particularly need to exist. In fact, when it comes to phones, the less real it is the easier it is to use.



[via Amber]

Finance class project looks at Stikkit

Livejournal user Justin (aka sushicrusader) promoted Stikkit (and Values of n) as HPV (high potential venture) in his Entrepreneurial Finance class. I look forward to hearing his findings.

Mashdown? Unmashing the mashup

If your mashup suddenly turns a little lumpy, it might just be because Google has quietly deprecated their SOAP-based search API. While the service is still running, they are not promising anything and there's no mention of just when it'll be coming to a full stop.

They did post a notice, mind you, hidden though it was in plain sight.

Prosser: But the plans were on display.
Arthur Dent: On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar.
Prosser: That's the display department.
Arthur Dent: With a torch.
Prosser: The lights had probably gone.
Arthur Dent: So had the stairs.
Prosser: But you did see the notice, didn't you?
Arthur Dent: Oh, yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign outside the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." Ever thought of going into advertising?
—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

First Round and Rob Hayes join the team

I'm thrilled no end to announce the addition of First Round Capital to Values of n's first round (led by Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures in October of this year).

I was lucky enough to spend a goodly amount of time with First Round's managing partner Josh Kopelman early on in Stikkit's life and came away bolstered by Josh's firm grasp—early though it was—on what we were building, why it was interesting, and thoughts about where our little yellow notes might lead us.

As if this weren't enough, this investment brings long-time (at least in Stikkit-time) and always-on supporter Rob Hayes to our board.

Rob and I met at PC Forum earlier this year where we fell into easy conversation — one that continued late into the night and has been ongoing ever since. He suggested I spend some time with Di-Ann Eisnor and the folks at Portland-based startup Platial, that we'd be a good complement to one another: he was right and we've been sharing an office in Portland's vibrant Pearl District ever since.

Rob's experience building simple, intuitive, integrated applications for the small screen at Go Corp and Palm means he is intimately familiar with what we're trying to accomplish with our "small page" approach to personal productivity (and we don't have all that pesky handwriting recognition to worry about). While he's never needed to ask why we're building Stikkit, Rob is never shy about asking how we mean do it. His active, engaged participation, strong business focus, and expectation of at least deep thought if not absolute answers to the tough questions has meant a lot to me over the past months and I welcome his continuing that role in an official capacity as a member of our board. (Not to mention his irreverent sense of humor and devilish grin–as seen on Flickr.)

(I've previously referred to Rob in this blog as "one of the early sausage makers" behind the scenes in Jerry Kaplan's Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, the book that started me on this entrepreneurial path back in 1994.)

Rob and First Round join our already stellar group of Silicon Valley- and Portland, Oregon-based angels brimming with encouragement, inspiration, and just the right mix of hands-on and light touch.

You can go home again

The Values of n team has been working its collective typing fingers down to the nub since our beta launch: surfacing new features, fixing bugs, designing and re-designing, chatting all but continuously with you, and readying our next version for public consumption.

You've more than likely noticed Stikkit's brand spankin' new home page (if you're logged in to Stikkit, you'll have to log out to see it) featuring some lovely new screencasts on just some of the ways you might use Stikkit in your daily life. You'll find oodles more in our screencasts forum.

What you may not yet have chanced to notice is the new filter-based navigation now baked into every list-style view (i.e. your list of stikkits, calendar, to-do list, etc.). Choose a particular month, day, or range of days; search by keyword; filter by tag; find only done or undone to-dos — or any combination thereof. And of course every combo is bookmarkable so that you can come back to "this week's undone to-dos," for instance.

And be sure to check out these additional new features and fixes:

• Persistent sign-in
• An initial (as yet unofficial and all-but-undocumented) take on a Stikkit API (we're very interested to know what you think, want, or may already have hacked together)
  
• Stikkits stuck by email respond with a copy of the emailed stikkit
  

Also, many thanks for all your suggestions on how we could better handle signing up new folks and getting them going. All new sign-ups will find their Stikkit lists pre-populated with sample stikkits pointing out some of the most useful features and common ways of using Stikkit. We'll also be pushing our updated sign-up process to the servers this coming week: sign-up will be instant with no waiting or confirming before diving right in.

There's so much in the hopper we can't wait to share. Please do keep passing your thoughts and suggestions our way.

Happy birthday Jane!

Jane Austen turned 231 years young yesterday.

With quips and quotes so numerous as to make it virtually impossible to call out the quintessential Jane, there is one in particular that sticks with me (especially on those days when I'm prone to taking things too seriously):

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" — Pride and Prejudice

If you've chanced to stumble on to my Rollyo searchrolls, you'll have found that I'm more than a bit of a Janeite. Nothing provides quite the same respite from my otherwise always-online life as a re-(re-)read of Pride and Prejudice (read or listen to it for the first time—again).

I also highly recommend the irreverent and hysterical Austen Blog: "one lump of snark or two?"

Throw it against the wall and see what sticks

Platialite and office-mate Jason Wilson passed me some Pixelnotes during class today.

A wallpaper consisting of four layers of varying grey tones on a bright primary backing. Each layer is perforated in a grid format and backed with a tacky adhesive similar to ‘post-it’ notes. Pixelnotes is inspired by the way we work within a space. The walls become functional, an integrated noticeboard that documents our activity within the room. Pixelated formations and shapes develop according to our patterns of use.

This lovely use of sticky notes as songlines won designer Duncan Wilson and collaborator Sirkka Hammer 2nd Prize in a "New Walls, Please!" competition in 2004.