Beta-Testing Scrybe

About a week ago, I finally got my invite to help beta test Scrybe, the hot new web2.0 application that’s supposed to revolutionize organization and productivity, and probably of interest to every reader of Lifehack and Lifehacker.

Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t been able to do a full blown acid test. The interface is an RIA (Rich Internet Application) that’s AJAX-driven (aka ARIA), and the calendaring features (Planner) at least are very fluid and sexy. The event alerts come in the form of mail, which I find not so useful, especially, when it happens for each event (they can be turned off).

I’m so used to Google Calendar now that anything that differs throws me for a loop. Google pops up a little dialog to tell you a certain event is starting in X minutes. (In my calendar, it’s 10 minutes prior.) What’s different in a good way is the colour-coding of labels. It also has the ability to create detailed task lists with options for assigning them to someone, setting dates and reminders, etc. (Actually, some features are coming.)

The ThoughtPad has a lot of features that I’m still exploring, but I found that there’s something about the workflow that I find restricting. It’s partly because Scrybe runs in a separate browser-based window (no toolbar), whereas most other web2.0 apps will run in the same Firefox window as you launched it from.

You can clip items from web pages, but if I’m not mistaken, there are still other page publishing features that haven’t been released yet. It’s those that I’m really looking forward to, and which I’ll talk about in the future. My preliminary impression is that Scrybe will live up to its exciting demo and be a great productivity tool for researchers, bloggers, whatever, because it takes the functionality of several web2.0 tools and marries them into one interface.