Adam Jordens@littlesquare:~/

I was just about to go to bed when I got an email from the folks at Scrybe inviting me into their beta (I suspect I applied awhile back and they’re just clearing through a backlog now).

The launch details are here. Their blog is also here.
I just logged in and played around with it for a few minutes. I don’t know very much about the product but it appears to be (another) online calendar and task tool (at least that’s what the initial phase looks like). The UI is flash-based and surprising easy to navigate. A double click here and a single click here and all of a sudden your jumping from the year perspective to the hourly perspective

I’m evaluating it right now on a Windows XP box with Firefox 2.0 and it’s running fine. It also sports an offline mode which although I haven’t tried yet could potentially set it apart from some of the competition. It also has a nifty ability to print calendars/tasks in such a way that you can fold them up neatly and take them with you (hopefully this isn’t their idea of an offline mode

I’m going to go to bed now so I’ll close with a general concern about these types of offerings. For all intents and purposes I’ve effectively sold my soul to Google. They own my email and desktop search. If I do track tasks and dates online I currently use Google’s tools. Moving forward, I’d seriously consider using Writely/Google’s word processor once they get some semblance of an offline version.

This isn’t to discount what Scrybe is doing and I haven’t read into them enough to say whether or not they’re competing directly with Google. I think there’s plenty of room for improvement (on the part of Google) with respect to user interface (amongst other things) but ultimately it comes down to data management. Google’s #1 far and beyond.

That being said, I’ll give Scrybe a shot over the next while to see how it performs. From the talk on their forums it looks like multi-person synchronization is in the cards which would be kind of interesting. If they could get it to sync (even just a push) with Google I’d be happy.

Time for bed. Snow storm in the morning.