- Test Center Tracker: Packeteer sizzles at CIFS; RIA development heats up
- Managing Switches for Policy-Based Networking
- Preview: Globalpex's content certification uniquely verifies physical content in the envelope
- Standards? What Standards?
- Test Center Tracker: Bridging technology and finance
- Preview: Parallels Server beta looks promising
- Test Center Tracker: Greener docs and a six-month itch
- A NAC for policy enforcement: Lockdown Networks, RIP
- Train Signal knows training.
- Test Center Tracker: Sticky sweet Sun storage, plus a hardy Ubuntu beta
January 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Preview: Scrybe organizer pushes Web 2.0 limits
Generating buzz about new software is relatively easy for established companies: Just look at the interest surrounding the public betas of Adobe Photoshop 3 and Microsoft Vista. But what if you're a startup with a Web 2.0 service -- and based solely on a YouTube demo, people were so enthralled they even offered payment for a login to the closed beta? I actually found that deal presented on Scrybe's forum, and naturally had to find out why.
Put simply, Scrybe is a Flash 9-based, open-standards calendaring and personal organizer, and it's packed with every bit of eye candy and fluid interaction Flash developers can muster. For example, in the Planner view, calendars zoomed and contracted as I clicked from day to week to month. While Scrybe's interface is a model design, that's only a small reason for all the attention. The rest is because it delivers a user experience and features that are often beyond anything else I've ever used.
Consider just one aspect of the calendar, a function called GlobalTimez. When I opened the details of a meeting, Scrybe displayed four world clocks so I didn't have to calculate the time for participants in Europe and Asia. Further, the software will display a secondary time zone alongside your daily planner appointments.
This attention to detail extends throughout. Type "Dinner at 6 p.m." anywhere in your calendar day and Scrybe automatically places the appointment in the 6 p.m. slot. I added tasks in the same way to my to-do list (called PowerLists). Similarly, information in different contexts is effortlessly linked: Drag an item from a to-do list to the calendar and it becomes an event with all the associated reminders.
ThoughtPad, the second main application, lets you assemble notes and Web clippings -- complete with links, images, and files. As with tasks, you label notes to keep them organized. A Bookmarklet let me highlight text and images on Web pages and the content was added to my ThoughtPad -- while I used a simple rich-text editor to add my own comments. Moreover, a preview at the bottom of ThoughtPad let me easily navigate forward or backward through my notes.
One important aspect of Web 2.0 apps that Google and others haven't mastered is offline access, which Scrybe nails. The service made a local copy of my data, let me work disconnected, and then automatically synced changes when I reconnected. Yet what's most intriguing is the low-tech, yet brilliant PaperSync. Scrybe provides three elegant print formats that you can fold in less than 20 seconds to take your data anywhere. 
There are some features missing from the phase two beta I tested, most notable calendar sharing. Scrybe indicated they are evaluating iCal, hCal, RSS, SSE, and e-mail for this feature (planned in the next beta cycle).
Even incomplete, Scrybe teaches the established players a lot about Web 2.0 innovations. While I'd love mobile capabilities (currently the interfaced requires a 1,024 by 768 pixel resolution screen), there's enough here to make me give up my Microsoft Outlook Calendar and abandon Google Calendar.
Scrybe Phase 2, Beta
Availability: Mid-February
Pricing: To be announced
Verdict: Scrybe's online organizer melds Web 2.0 innovations with new approaches to traditional functions, including printing. With a minimalist design and attention to detail characteristic of Apple products, Scrybe should find a home with business and professional users faced with planning complex schedules and capturing notes -- especially anyone needing to work offline
Posted by Mike Heck on January 23, 2007 11:24 AM
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Great to know. I've been looking for an organizer. I like the set up. Looks pretty good.
Posted by: PDX Guy at March 13, 2008 10:16 PMWonderful...but, er...can someone send me an invite so I can see for myself?
TIA
sb
Posted by: Sierra Bravo at August 30, 2007 08:58 AMWe've implemented similar printing styles in Nozbe - our Getting Things Done tasks and projects organizer:
http://blogs.hitrss.com/nozbe/e61e2028
People have asked a lot for this feature.
Posted by: Michael at May 6, 2007 10:12 AMDave,
Thanks much for the additional insight based on your own testing. I couldn't agree more with your observations. The Scrybe team is doing excellent work and, as you say, really listening to comments from the beta users. That's a potent combination which should help make this a very successful product.
- Mike
Posted by: Mike Heck at January 26, 2007 07:10 AMMike,
Good review. I have been using Scrybe since early November 2006. The video on YouTube impressed me. Adobe's tools in a master craftsman's hands can really create a wonderful application. Having struggled with Outlook all these years, I always look for its replacement. I had high hopes for Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning but they are not there yet so I moved onto using Google's calendar a bit but I could not replace my corporate Outlook calendar. Scrybe, while still in beta, has quickly become my primary calendar and task management tool. In fact, I am even more organized now then when I started.
While still rough around the edges, this very useful product is led by a team that is focused on improving the product even while in beta. They have made several bug a feature enhancements based on user input. Many more are slated for future implementation.
The PaperSync, Scrybe's print version, is brilliant. One feature I would like to see implemented is duplex printing. I currently manually do this to great effect and if they add it as a standard feature it will be more efficient. How good is the PaperSync? In my pocket during the work day are two pieces of paper. One sheet has a hourly calendar for 12 days and includes the top few tasks I have assigned for each day, on the back are my 75 tasks organized into 31 categories. The other sheet has my calendar snap shot with one month on each side. We all know PDAs can hold more data but there is something about having this data on paper that seems more effective.
I look forward to more good things from the Scrybe team.
- Dave
Posted by: David Gerbino at January 25, 2007 07:31 PM
