Gettin' Stikkit widget

I've long thought just how odd it is that the sticky notes stuck to your virtual desktop are, well, stuck to your virtual desktop. The affordance of being able to stick a sticky note of the paper variety to someone else's desktop or your other desktop never seems to have made the leap across that atom-to-bit chasm.

Since we released the Stikkit API, I've eagerly awaited a Stikkit widget for my OS X dashboard. And as if by magic, here it is...

Stikkiteer James Adam rolled up his programmatic sleeves and tucked into Dashcode to build a full-featured and well-styled Stikkit Dashboard Widget. Create new stikkits, find and edit existing ones—multiple at a time—and click the "synch" button to save them to Stikkit online. And the widget grabs a snapshot of the latest online each time you show the dashboard so that you always have piping hot stikkits just when you need them.

While you're there picking up your copy of the widget, be sure to read Adam's thoughts on "Stikkit - My Smart, Short-Term Online Memory."

And if you're a Windows stikkiteer, you've a widget too, thanks to the work of Brett Kelly on winstikker. You might have run across Brett's detailed piece on "How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse" featured on Lifehacker a little while back. He also wrote a utility to import your Gmail contacts into Stikkit. Writes Brett, "Any more of this stuff and people are going to start to wonder if I work for Values of n (makers of Stikkit - and no, I don’t work for them - yet ;)."

This is the stuff of Stikkit and the very reason we sat down to write it in the first place and then—quick as we could given the time-constraints of a small team—followed it with a complete, fully-documented API. We're so appreciative of the efforts of so many people to share their expertise with the community, whether that be as apps and code, tips and techniques, detailed write-ups, suggestions, and bug reports.

(Want to try your hand at a widget all your own? No matter which platform you call home, if you're up for a little tinkering you can use either of these two widgets as a starting point as both keep their source in plain sight—and winstikker is licensed as Open Source.)

P.s. Apologies for the title... I just couldn't not.

Stikkit quick with Quicksilver

There are few applications that truly revolutionize the way you use your computer. And only one I've ever come across that utterly invigorates every interaction and application, every nook and cranny. Of course I'm talking about Quicksilver for OS X, described by its author Nicholas Jitkoff as: "A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." A bold claim—and at the same time a rather vague one. Yet Quicksilver delivers. Whether it clocks you from the word go or quietly sneaks up on you through daily use, QS has a habit of enriching the apps it touches (and there are few it doesn't).

As an avid QS'er (Quicksilverer?), I was thrilled when Merlin Mann tipped me a little while back to the fact that he'd roped Nicholas into building a full-fledged QS plug-in for Stikkit. The plug-in enables you to send text to a new stikkit, edit an existing one, append and prepend, search by text and tag, jump right to the Stikkit you were after, and more. True to form, QS has again revolutionized the way I use yet another app—this time my own.

(If you're a Quicksilver user, simply type Command-Space or your QS trigger of choice, Command-" to get to the plug-ins list, select "Refresh list of plug-ins" from the actions gear at the bottom of the window, and the Stikkit plug-in should show up in the list.)

Fabulous work, Nicholas!

P.s. I'd be remiss in not giving props to AppleScripting talents of Stikkit user iNik who first plugged QS into Stikkit.