Austin on Rails Happy Hour

The week of SXSW is fast approaching and evening events are starting to pop up. Last year I helped organize the first Austin on Rails Happy Hour with Damon Clinkscales and Rob Jones. This year the Stikkit team will be pitching in to help make this event happen and Rael, Asha, and I will be there and look forward to meeting you in person.

Last year's event was a ball—we had over 150 people show up and many great introductions were made and friendships formed.

The Austin on Rails Happy Hour (stikkit!) will be held on March 12th from 6-9pm.

The venue will be the same as last year: Buffalo Billiards is comfortable and inviting, has shuffle board and pool tables, and plenty of room to meet fellow Rails developers.

There will be free drinks and appetizers. If you are not attending SXSW and don't have a badge, you'll need to RSVP. Check out the Upcoming event for more details.

Technorati Tags: community, sxsw, rails, stikkit

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.

How Cinnamon uses Stikkit

Stikkiteer Cinnamon recently discovered our little yellow notes and integrated them rather nicely into her process for managing her custom purse making business.

With Stikkit, I can create the to-do list, but I can have it email a person the info on the list by just telling it to "email order@ordername.com" after I type in the info on the stikkit. I can also create a Stikkit email address and if I get emailed something that I want to add to a stikkit, instead of having to cut and then go paste in another window, I can just email it to my secret email address with Stikkit. If I have to do something on a specific day, I can also set it up to remind me either via email or via a text message on my phone. And it knows dates because it also incorporates a calendar. So I can create a stikkit that says "order book club book, bookstore open till 7, the name of the book, 1/19/07 remind me" and it will add all the info to a stikkie, add the entry to a date and email me to remind me to get the book.

Did I mention I'm in love with this app? Cause I am, like totally and completely.

Hearing about how people use Stikkit in their lives is both deeply gratifying and incredibly helpful. While we obviously know Stikkit is being used, stikkiteer feedback and stories like Cinnamon's are how we know just how.

Thank you Cinnamon!