Have you heard the phrase “Another day, another dollar?”
At Sticky, we prefer the phrase “Another day, another step towards a world of physical+digital apps”.
Alright, I made that up. But it’s been a big week. Read on to find out what we got up to.
Introducing “client logic”
In our first tutorial Building with an environment, we walked through setting up a local environment, including a local HTTP server, to develop Sticky apps. This is how we build apps because our flagships apps like Stickyretail have a lot of moving parts. But needing an environment outside of a browser limits who can make Sticky apps and what devices they can use. Phones and tablets were almost certainly off the table.
It gives us great pleasure to announce that you now don’t need a local environment to develop Sticky apps. You don’t need to leave your browser, or even the Sticky dashboard. We’re calling this “client logic”, and it’s our special way of serving your apps for you so you don’t need a special setup or, when you go to production, secure web hosting.
- Use a fully featured, ‘full screen’ JavaScript code editor to write your apps inside the dashboard
- Forget about having to load our SDK or writing a full HTML file — “client logic” does this for you
- Apps have a prettier, shorter URL (although apps will always serve from our domain)
Find out how to use “client logic” in our second tutorial Building without an environment.
Dashboard
As well as implementing “client logic” across the stack, we gave the dashboard some love. You can now easily see your public+private keys on the home screen, and we added a direct link to buy stickers. FYI, they are amazing value and ship worldwide for free. Just saying…
SDK
We added a shorthand function `session.events.getAll` which covers the most common events use case, “get me events for this application by the current user”.
We added a `setPublicKey` function. Usually your public key is automatically picked up by the SDK from the “sticky payload” at the end of the URL (the bit that reads `?sticky=…`). Now you can avoid having the “sticky payload” on your production app by specifically setting your public key and hard coding application IDs, meaning you can run Sticky apps with pretty URLs like https://myapp.com.
And more!
We moved all of our infrastructure to sticky.to. The site used to be served from stickyadventur.es due to some technical debt from the very beginning of Sticky. We paid it back. Now you can browse sticky.to to your heart’s content.
We improved the sign up experience. Signing up takes you straight into the ‘logged in’ dashboard and emails you your public+private keys. It gives you an example application and ‘virtual test sticker’ to get started.
We resolved even more tech debt. It’s so easy to ‘accrue’ tech debt in the early days, but it’s also the easiest time to pay it back. Today marks the moment we got to 150 API unit tests. Cheers!
