I've had beta access to
scrybe for a while, but haven't had time to complete this post til now. What's scrybe? It's a cool new web app alternative for Outlook. But there's heaps of these already out there, including one from all three of the big companies, i.e.
Google Calendar,
Yahoo Calendar and
Windows Live Calendar. Why another one? Well, the cool drawcard that scrybe has is that it works both online AND offline. It does some funky stuff with the browser cache, but any changes you make online are stored locally and on their servers, and any offline changes made are automatically synchronised when you go online again. You just set your browser to offline mode (File -> Work Offline) and navigate to the site as per usual.
That's the main screen of Flash-based scrybe, the calendar and todo list (on the bottom right). Click on a day to expand it, click add and type in your event. If you refer to a time in your description, it'll try to read that and put your event at the right time, e.g. "meeting matt for dinner at 9pm" will create an event at 9am titled "meeting matt for dinner". Double-click on a day and it'll fill the screen with that day's details.
What you don't see in the pictures is the cool and effective animations they've employed. If you click on the year view (by clicking on the year in the top left corner), the current month view will shrink back and the year view will appear. Double-click on a month now, and it'll zoom into the view for that month. Double-click on a day and it'll zoom in to a day view for that day. Eyecandy aside, they are really effective in showing you what's happening, and what just changed, instead of having to look around for other visual clues. Drag and drop functionality works throughout the app too, e.g. relocating an event.
Each event/todo item has the standard notes field, labels (categories),
recurrences, and reminders among other things in the top right section.
What sucks though, is that that same area is used for seeing todo item
details without much change, so it's quite confusing at first trying to
work out whether you're viewing the details for an event or a todo item. The todo list has some pretty cool functions though, allowing you to filter down and organise your list. The ability to convert a task to a list is great, e.g. when a simple task to fix the car turns into a multiple task item, like buy parts, find info, put new parts in. It will recognise times in todo items too and assign reminders to them, similar to the event example above. In this age of tagging though, you can't assign multiple labels which sucks.
Something else that's unique to scrybe (AFAIK) is GlobalTimez, which loads when you click the globe icon in the details section.
With people collaborating all over the world now, this feature is great trying to work out when to meet or when to call. The right side shows recently used time zones, and the left side allows you to pick somewhere and get the current time, as well as the time difference.
Another good idea is PaperSync, which prints out your schedule for a set period so you can carry it around. One of the styles look something like
this (PDF link).
It's good that they're thinking about sharing capabilities too. The functionality's not there yet - they're evaluating iCal, hCal, RSS, Email, SSE etc. There doesn't seem to be any sharing functionality planned for the todo list though, nor is there much hint of group calendars. That said, that's probably not the market they're aiming for.
This is the second part of scrybe, ThoughtPad. Think of it as a better Outlook Notes or similar to
Google Notebook, because that's basically what it is. You can format text in your notes as well as add links, files and images. What's cool about it is they have a bookmarket that allows you to add content to it from anywhere
without leaving the page itself. It's not unique, but a welcome feature nonetheless.
Scrybe is still in private beta mode, so if you want to check it out you can go on their site and register your interest, or check out their forums
here. It's a step forward from the many web calendars out there but it's still not good enough for day-to-day usage, unless you like writing things on your PaperSync and entering them in later, or you've got a desktop net connection 24/7. There's no quick add functionality that's accessible all the time on your computer, no desktop shortcut to load it (although you can create your own), or no quick snapshot of your day without having to load and log in to it. A desktop widget would be good. Also, you can't add things to ThoughtPad via drag and drop - imagine if you have a document that you need access to somewhere else, and all you have to do is drag it on to a ThoughtPad hotspot on your desktop, and it'll automatically upload it. There's no mobile interface either, or public APIs. The integration is not good enough, especially for something designed to replace a traditionally desktop app. It's resolution is also fixed at 1024x768, but a fix is on the cards. There's no contact section too, but maybe that's not the direction it's aiming for. It is in beta mode though, so things can change, especially if they take up Adobe's new
Apollo platform which offers much of the desktop integration I'm complaining about.
Scrybe has a promising app with a bright future, especially for those who don't need the full-blown Outlook. It's online/offline functionality gives it a one-up over desktop apps like Sunbird, and web apps like Google Calendar. That said, until they come up with an offline/online mobile client, I won't be using it day in day out - there's no way it can replace my O2 Atom right now after I've become so accustomed to it.