Values of n Blog

Saturday, February 03, 2007

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!

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

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.

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