Trying out Stikkit and writing a Stikkit Google Gadget

I’ve started playing around with Stikkit a little bit. I’m not entirely sure what I want to use it for, but it has the advantage of a pretty good API, which means that, whatever I do with it, I can do it from the Dashboard, Quicksilver, and anywhere I can run my own code.

James Adam, who wrote a Dashboard widget for Stikkit, wrote:

Instead of using Stikkit as my online information repository, I've found that I used Stikkit as a kind of online-short-term memory.

I think that’s a good direction to take, since, with the Quicksilver tool, I can quickly post to Stikkit from home and work, and I can access my Stikkits from anywhere with a browser.

Right now I’m trying out Stikkit for personal todo items (I love OmniFocus at work, but it’s too heavyweight and on-one-machine for home use) and I’m thinking of also using it for tickler file things, since it’s easy to tie dates to things. (Formal events I’m keeping on Google Calendar, sometimes fed in from Upcoming.)

Since I’ve also been recently taken with writing gadgets for iGoogle (mmm… scroll-y) I took a few evenings and wrote a Google Gadget for Stikkit.

The gadget will show a few days’ of upcoming events and also all of your undone todos (except those that appear as events). Clicking on the “-” next to a Stikkit will mark it as done.

You’ll need your Stikkit API key to get this to work. It’s available from your Stikkit account settings page (click on your username).

Driving the Stikkit API from a Google Gadget is slightly tricky. Google provides the _IG_FetchContent function to get around same-domain policy and grab the JSON as text. A simple eval call then turns it into a data structure.

POSTing and PUTing is trickier. I ended up using a <form> element that is targeted at a hidden <iframe>, specifying the “text” format for the result. Stikkit supports a _method parameter to override the POST into a PUT for the todo toggling. This works when it works, but due to cross-domain limitations the gadget code can’t tell when it doesn’t work.

Anyway, if you’re using Stikkit and give this Google Gadget a try, leave me a comment here or drop an e-mail. I’m open to feature requests as well as suggestions into how to get the most out of Stikkit.

Also, if anyone can poke Rael and the gang and get SMS reminders to AT&T working, I would be much obliged.