Software Review: Why Scrybe?

Despite my generally skeptical nature, I like Scrybe, or at least I like what I've been able to glean from the iscrybe website and video overview. Like any new product with as-yet-to-be-determined potential (it's intended to help keep life in the Internet age somewhat more cleanly organized) Scrybe feels over-hyped.

Scrybe is a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today's lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way.

It would not be hard to rewrite this sentence to mean something, but you'd need to know what it was meant to mean before you could do it. But somehow I have let me hype-defenses down and wish that I could be a part of the beta ("temporarily closed"). I watched the video overview and liked what I saw, at least partially because I was ready to like what I saw. I am the market for this product. They know what I struggle with every day and their solution appears to work the way I work—at least this is my impression.

This isn't really a full-featured organizer, at least not yet. It includes a calender, todo lists, and "thoughtstreams," but no integration with address book or email functions. Thoughtstreams don't interest me, though it might be that if I knew what they were, I might find them useful. But even though my hype-defenses are down, I've still got buzz-word defenses in tact.

What really appeals to me is the simple ability to integrate todo lists with calendar events in a way that maintains context. In other words, lists have an awareness of the calendar state. So as you look through by month, week, or day, the lists reflect your view. At the same time, the user interface has an elegance I haven't seen before, though I can't really be certain of this perceived quality until I can actually try Scrybe out.

Scrybe also has another big plus in its favor. Adobe has made a major investment in the company. Scrybe is written in Flash and one can only assume that they'll be able to add much more functionality by adopting Adobe's rich Internet Application tools, Flex and AIR, and they'll likely have a lot of help doing this. One futher hopes that the next somewhat more public release will be even more elegant, functional, and innovative, and that there will be a version running in Mac OS X Tiger.