Scrybe gets you organized

Hopefully it was a good Scotch:

http://www.themacallan.com

It’s certainly pretty cool stuff but it isn’t going to solve your email problems. From a GTD process perspective you’re still going to have to get the next actions out of your email client and into the todo lists in Scrybe, and I can’t see easily how you’d operate lists for different contexts (@Home @Office etc) within Scrybe. I must admit to being tempted to have a look (I signed up for the beta) but I can’t see Scrybe replacing my Outlook / NetCentrics GTD add-in combo anytime soon.

What I thought stood out as an idea was the way you could get Hipster PDA style functionality out of the product via the papersync feature. I liked that a lot.

Scrybe is going to have to do what existing web apps do and more. The “more” already seems to be there but, as Steve pointed out, Scrybe will need to provide for multiple calendars and the ability to either sync those calendars with iCal/Outlook or some other popular desktop app or, at the very least, allow people to subscribe to those calendars with varying degrees of publicity.

On the whole, though, Scrybe looks like it will be nothing less than revolutionary in this space.

The contextual calendar looks very similar to the Datalens Outlook plugin developed by MSR and University of Maryland…I wonder if they’re related?

P.S. Ditto on the sync with Outlook/GCalendar/iCal. Actually, if it sync’ed to my iPod calendar, that would be terrific.

Dave: it wasn’t a Macallan. Glenfiddich. It’s pretty good too.

I’ve got some comments with the author of Scrybe here.

This service seems to be very eager to build a calender that tech. lovers will be falling in love with. The offline feature of scrybe is my favorite feature.

Thank you for sharing this story with me !

The Scrybe video is, indeed, amazing. Great use of motion design to make context clear. Powerful capture and organizational tools. Etc. etc. etc.

But… I remain skeptical (and anyone who knows me will know why) that any software, any system, any coach, any anything short of divine intervention will get me organized.

Wow!! That is very impressive. I think the Outlook folk will be having late-night meetings on this one. The usability bar has just been raised. This should be way scarrier than Google because it has all of the smart-client capability people like you and I crave.

If they can get all of that into the mail organization and integration area, it looks like they will have it all covered.

I love the fact that they seem to be able to tell time properly and deal with actions and calendar events that may be happening in other than the current reader’s timezone. Outlook hasn’t mastered that as of 2003 and I haven’t tried it in 2007 yet. It is the one thing that has me not change the clock settings on my laptop when I travel, because my calendar (and its recurring appointments) will be screwed forever if I do that. Changes for daylight-savings are bad enough but I can’t prevent those. Maybe I should see if I can put my laptop on GMT without DST and coordinate everything with secondary timezones relative to that. Dunno. Grr.

What’s even more interesting is the way that interest is being generated in this product. They just disintermediated “Demo” and went with nice videos and You Tube. Hmm.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the self-invitation list grows for the beta, and how they deal with the challenge to ship something before interest wanes.

But a very nice way to create early-adopter interest for sure.

The next question (and deal-breaker) for me has to do with who owns the on-line bits. Can I host my own or not will be a big question.

But either way, I don’t think desktop productivity tools are going to ever be the same again.

Do you have interview set up with them yet?

Rooster’s Rail also has a review: http://roostersrail.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/scrybe-the-holy-grail-of-web-apps/

Near the beginning is a link to a longer alternative video that is also on YouTube. This provides a bit more depth.

It is also interesting (from a “Naked Conversations” perspective) that Scrybe folk are watching the blogs and responding to questions that show up in people’s comment streams. There’s an example there.

I am a little puzzled by the “nothing to install” that allows off-line working. It may be more about “nothing to go through an installation procedure for”. We’ll see …

TClipper is nearly ready (available from Oct. 24). Here is the snapshot:

http://www.tablane.net/snapshot/tclipper1.jpg

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