You know we're living in a beta world, and I am a beta girl guy. It seems that we're constantly hearing announcements about "The Next Big Thing" to reach private beta and how totally awesome it is - and then the waiting game begins. True to boom form, most of the services never actually make it public (I'm currently wearing a shirt advertising Life IO, which was supposed to launch in September.)

The Museum of Modern Betas chronicles the 50 most anticipated upcoming services as measured by how often they show up on del.icio.us. Topping the list is Scrybe, which Jason wrote about back in October.

[via UXMagazine]

Scrybe, that web-based PIM I was dying to try, has released a major beta revision which now includes the widely anticipated ThoughtPad functionality.

In Scrybe there is a Planner pane which contains your calendar and tasks, and now the ThoughtPad pane which contains web clippings, or simply text and images as notes. These notes can be organized into different Labels (essentially tags), making it easier to locate relevant information when you're looking for it. Basic formatting like bold, italics and bullet points are included, but this is definitely not a full-featured word processor.

The ThoughtPad includes a browser at the bottom of the window that provides thumbnails of the clippings you have stored. This can be useful when scrolling through a number of related clippings to quickly locate a specific one, particularly if you're like me and your mind works in a particularly visual manner.

Yet again the latest update of Scrybe feels quite polished, and is very much usable. If I have any misgivings about using Scrybe as my productivity application of choice, it would be the user interface decision to confine task management to a relatively small corner of the Planner pane. As much as I need to keep an eye on the hard landscape of appointments I have scheduled, I typically find myself spending more time managing the tasks that need to fit in between those scheduled appointments. Working in a tiny corner of an application 80% of the time feels awkward, and demotes Scrybe (for me, at least) to the status of Worthy Productivity Application, but just not for me.

You remember the video, right?

I got my wish. Eleven days ago I posted about a new online productivity suite that I was dying to try. Well it's late on Halloween evening, and I've just spent the last hour playing with the various features in Scrybe that enticed me when I first saw the demo video. And so far, I think we have a winner on our hands.

After playing around with the user interface for a bit, which is sort of fun in and of itself, I decided to test the killer feature that puts Scrybe in a league of its own when it comes to online calendars and productivity applications: offline use and synchronization.

What can I say? It just works. I turned off my wireless adapter, put my browser into offline mode, logged in, and proceeded to add and change data in my Scrybe account. Everything worked as you'd expect - it felt like being online. Then I turned my wireless back on, put my browser back into online mode, logged into my account, and everything was there, as expected. Okay, so far, so good. So then, I moved over to another computer, and logged in to Scrybe. And, as expected, everything was there, as well. Perfect!

So what is there to complain about with the beta release? So far, surprisingly little. My one peeve is that the Scrybe window defaults to a specific size, which is slightly too long for my laptop's native resolution of 1280x800, and awkwardly short for my two available external monitor's resolutions at 1440x900 and 1280x1024. Given that Scrybe is written in Flash, as TechCrunch notes, it seems strange that they would have chosen not to make the interface fluid like, for example, Google Calendar. Certainly it should be possible. Let's hope this is on Scrybe's radar for future enhancements. For more thoughts on what it means that Scrybe is written in Flash, check out Ryan Stewart's thoughts at ZDNet.

I'm sure as time goes on bugs will be found, and fixed (oh, the beauty of online apps), but for now Scrybe is giving us a seriously strong first draft to play with. In terms of functionality, this beta release of Scrybe is almost feature complete, based on what they showed in the demonstration video. The only feature that did not make the cut for this version is the bookmarking / web clipping functionality. According to Scrybe this will be added in a few weeks, to be followed by the mysterious sharing functionality that is alluded to at the end of the first video.

Although I could take this time to walk through the functionality in Scrybe again, it's really no different than what we saw in the demo video, and I described in our first post about the system. That is to say that so far, everything works as I'd hoped it would.

Right now the only way to get a beta account is to sign up at Scrybe on their main page. Unfortunately for all of us excited users, Scrybe is doing a phased rollout of their beta program. Although this is frustrating for those of us that would like accounts and can't get them immediately, I think they deserve credit for deciding to do things right. Faizan, CEO and co-founder of Scrybe tells us "We could have launched with a bang and gotten another mega spike on Alexaholic, but the purpose is to control the hype and improve the product with focused users." That's a very refreshing perspective. For more information about the beta rollout, check out the Launch Details page on the Scrybe site.

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.