In this era of worshipping at the temple of "The David" (Getting Things Done), there is no shortage of offline and online productivity suites. With that in mind, I rarely get all that excited about the new Web 2.0 offerings that get a bit of buzz here and there. But Scrybe appears to be different.
Way different.
Like wow different. Here, just watch:
Scrybe is an online organizer that is grounded in one word: context. The user interface is designed to always give the user context relating to the data they are dealing with. So if you're working in your calendar, you can fly up to a year view, or dig down all the way to a day view, and all of the related information is intelligently displayed so that you never lose track of where you are. Watching the video on their site, you immediately get a feeling of "that just makes sense". Google Calendar is good, but doesn't appear to be as good as this.
Before moving on to other features of the online organizer, I should stop for a moment and mention that while Scrybe is an online organizer, it's the first one to support the ability to work with it offline, seamlessly. You simply set your browser to offline mode, and navigate to your Scrybe account the way you would if you were online, and everything works exactly as it does online. As soon as you have an internet connection, your changes will synchronize back to your online account.
The video shows seamless importing of popular document formats like Excel, Word and Acrobat, and can take a list from Excel and turn it into a todo list immediately. Information from within Scrybe can also be exported back out to these popular formats.
The Todo list portion of Scrybe is also grounded in the concept of always maintaining context; a list for a specific project will contain items that are also related to dates, for example, as well as a parent category for Work, Home, or however else you choose to organize your todo lists. Todos can be viewed based on any of these contexts, as well as viewed by the date that reminders have been set for them. Think Backpack on steroids.
There is a note taking component to Scrybe as well, that seems somewhat similar to Google Notebook, but maintains connections to the other portions of the Scrybe organizer, therefore maintaining your frame of reference - yet again, it's about context.
Finally, Scrybe takes an interesting perspective when talking about synchronization: instead of worrying about how to interact with the myriad of devices that are out there, they simply provide intelligent printable templates that can be folded and tucked into your back pocket, so you can take all of the relevant information you need with you for the coming week. Brilliant.
Unfortunately, Scrybe is not yet available to try, but the site proudly proclaims that it will be launching in beta in October. Seeing that October is running out, it should be soon. We've been in contact with one of the co-founders, and understand that Scrybe will be running a closed beta initially. We've been promised a beta account during the closed beta period, so we'll certainly give our feedback when that happens. We'll also make sure to let you all know as soon as the public beta is available. For now, check out the video, and let us know in the comments if we're right to be as excited as we are.















Reader Comments (Page 4 of 4)
10-28-2006 @ 5:50PM
bizen said...
Print it out? Brilliant? That's not brilliant. You could do that with a Mimeograph machine in 1967.
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11-01-2006 @ 7:03PM
Bart said...
Looks similar to Datelens: http://www.windsorinterfaces.com/datelens.shtml
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11-01-2006 @ 10:37PM
Fernando Giron Bayon said...
Mucho bueno, can't wait to get my hads on it.
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11-11-2006 @ 9:00AM
Dr. Olaimi said...
This is just outstanding!
HOWEVER, indeed that reminds me with the same level of innovative break through when "The Brain" was first intruduced (www.thebrain.com).
The intresting part would be challanging to be frank! let us examine my "presonal" requirements for "perfecting" Scrybe:
1. cut-n-past from PDFs, Partial Images, and so on
2. being able to include Flashes / animations
3. ability to export the final (self formated) repost/research to Doc PDF HTML etc.
4. Multi-linguality
5. refferencing is gathered as if it is a "foot notes" rather than "embedded" within!
I suppose this is enugh so far! otherwise I need to hire those brilliant developers for myself and make a custome made "single user" copy for me and me and me only! ;-)
Thanks
Al Olaimi
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12-05-2006 @ 3:10PM
Mike said...
Do we know that Scrybe won't sync to portable devices, either directly, or indirectly through Outlook? I agree that this is absolutely a must feature. I'm quite happy with airset's calendar, but I need an online task list that will sync with my pocket pc and allow categories to be assigned to tasks. I can't tell if Scrybe will do this. The "paper sync" could be usefull for printing out a shopping list, but I wouldn't wan't to use it for anything else.
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12-08-2006 @ 4:25PM
Steve Lang said...
The offline mode is more important to most people than PDA synchronization. More people have notebook computers than PDA's. If anything, some sort of simple Web 1.0 view for Treo's and other smartphones would be the most useful.
The Thoughtpad view intrigues me the most (next to the offline access and synchronization.)
I also like the contextual display thing in the calendar, although it's not so earth-shattering to me.
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