These stay nice and soft and moist for days after making them and they do not get super sticky. Once you roll them in sugar they will stay non-sticky.
You can add any kind of extract and colour to these.
I may have overheated my sugar/corn syrup as it had yellowed (I will have to test my candy thermometer) and this would influence the final colour of the candy. Mine turned out kind of orange-y when I added the yellow.
The fruit pectin is what makes them gel and solidify (same stuff you use to make jam and jelly). I am not aware of any substitutes.
You could probably use a thick syrup or honey in place of the corn syrup but I've never tried it, so I can't tell you if the results will be good or not.
Some stores may sell this as "liquid glucose"
You do need a candy thermometer for this. You can determine if you have reached the "soft crack" stage by dropping a small amount of the boiling liquid into some ice water. There are photos and resources online that may help you understand this if you google "candy making stages"
Like this one:
http://candy.about.com/od/candybasics...
For those of you that will say "this has a lot of sugar in it", yes this does, this is candy.
I am not recommending that you eat this for dinner for a week. It has the same amount of sugar as the gumdrops you would buy at a store.
I'm sure you could try to put these in silicone molds to form shapes (if you don't like the cube shape), the trick would be finding small enough ones. These is very sweet and needs to be in small pieces.