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.

Stikkit in your pocket

This is just too freakin' cool for words. You know those groovy fold-it-yourself PocketMod booklets?

Using our new Stikkit API, Aaron Straup Cope has stuffed his stikkits into his pockets to take with him when he's away from the keyboard.

Writes Aaron, "The possibilities are endless if by endless you mean four or five letter-sized sheets of paper . . ."

Wow!

Stikkit awaits your API calls

Stikkit may, at first blush, seem to be all about emulating its ubiquitous paper counterpart. And while we certainly do draw inspiration and analogy from the role of notebooks, sticky notes, receipts, index cards, and other scraps of paper in organizing your life, Stikkit is no more about virtual paper than the sticky notes spackling your office and home are about actual paper.

At the core of how we conceived of and are designing and building Stikkit is the belief that the success and endurance of the humble sticky note is its being an affordance. Its dimensions encourage the bite-sized, the smallest atomic unit, the stand-alone. Its shape invites arrangement: horizontal for process, vertical for lists, or just clustered by relatedness. Its color runs the gamut from strictly representative — importance, status, assignment — to simply pleasant.

Above all else, sticky notes represent particles in flow. They're appointments to be scheduled, to-dos to be done, bookmarks (both literally and figuratively) to be re-found, and fragments to be rewritten, re-filed, or simply re-stuck.

Every time I see a cluster of physical notes either purposefully stuck in a neat line or seemingly clustered in some novel formation, I can't help think about where that information's headed and for what purpose.

While we do obviously have strong ideas about the present and future of Stikkit itself, we've never presumed to know just where, how, or to whom you're going to stikkit. Nor how you want to use your data. And in what formation it'll be most useful to you.

So, to provide at least the more programmatically-inclined of you the ability to fold and form your stikkits for your own purposes, we give you the Stikkit API.

We've opened the back door so the tinkerers and mashuppers among you can get your hands and code on your Stikkit data quickly and easily.

By "quickly," we mean that there are no hoops to jump through to get rolling with the API: if you've got a Stikkit account, you've got the key. Log into Stikkit and then visit your account settings to grab your unique API key.

By "easily," we mean that we've made the Stikkit API as simple and intuitive as possible. The API is REST-based, so you simply pass it HTTP requests, and you get back data in the data format of your choice. And even more than that, it's Stikkit-based, so it works just the way the site itself does — just the way we think an API should work.

So let the origami begin! Visit the Stikkit API page for details on how to get started. And be sure to drop by Stikkit API forum to ask questions, share ideas, propose hacks or apps, or show us what you've built.