Introducing Stickies!, a visual team interaction tool for web projects in progress.

On September 11th we had one of our quarterly rumbles in Chicago. During these times, our distributed team comes together for a one day jam session. We try to pick something fun and out of the norm to build together as a team. The goal of this time is to take a break from the norm and engage in a low-stress, fun team project that we complete in one day and an outcome that will hopefully be useful to someone when we're finished. Normally we work together at the beautiful COOP in chicago, but due to a misfire on scheduling, we took over a corner of the Starbucks down the street.

During our last rumble, we revamped the cramerdev.com website. We've since received lots of great feedback on our site and it has been listed in numerous web design galleries.

This time, we built Stickies!, a web app designed to simplify client and team interaction on website projects in progress. Simply put, Stickies! is Sticky Notes for Your Website. This is an idea that we've had on the back burner for a while. We actually used a primitive version of Stickies! on a project some time ago. Today, we re-created the product and launched it as a free web service that anyone can use on any website. We built Stickies! using Persevere (a JSON database and JavaScript application server), Dojo Toolkit, HTML5, and 960.gs. By using all these tools, our 5 person team was able to essentially design and build the entire application and public website in a short work day.

Using Persevere's object storage engine, we were able to quickly create a working API without having to spend time working on data architecture. This translated beautifully to the client side when it came time to make the AJAX interactions that create and save the notes.

We wanted Stickies! to be very easy for website designers to use, so we released it as a web service. This means that we store all of the sticky note data for you on our servers and you don't have to worry about installing an application or database or anything like that. One of the technical challenges involved in building Stickies! was getting around the Same Origin Policy, which prevents JavaScript on one website from accessing methods and properties on different websites. This is a useful security measure, but didn't make our task any easier. With Stickies! we are not breaking this policy, but working around it with some handy features of the DoJo Toolkit. The important thing for you is that it works and it is safe.

You can try out Stickies! for yourself by visiting the new Stickies! website at http://websticki.es.