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watching their promotional video, Scrybe is going to be the next generation of online calendar-applications. more so, the dynamically zooming calendar views look slicker than any desktop schedule seen so far. besides common calendar functionality, Scrybe manages integrated tasklists and stores thoughts and web-snippets of all kind. the not-to-be-missed video demos the gorgeous user-interface, extended suppot for different timezones, impressive copy&paste import from office-applications (Microsoft Excel in particular) and - a bit oldschool but nonetheless handy - printing-capabilities.

while this all sounds (& looks) great, the best is yet to come: Scrybe promises seamless offline access, therefor overcoming current online office-apps’ major drawback. it’s not really clear how this offline mode & synchronisation will be implemented, but possible solutions would be a local desktop-application, a local proxy-server or some kind of flash storage (the latter being the most advanced & platform-independent approach - also, a commenter at Ajaxian pointed out the Scrybe is most likely a Flash/Flex-application).

beta-accounts should be available somewhere until the end of october, and according to the buzz I’m not the only one looking forward to get my hands on Scrybe

after signing up for Microsoft’s supposed YouTube-competitor soapbox - which is currently still in closed beta - several weeks ago, my account finally got approved today. seems the recent YouTube-aquisition stimulated the soapbox-team to get a move on. buzz among bloggers is increasing, as on10 - another Microsoft-asset - gave away 10.000 invites two days ago. in terms of features, soapbox tries to stay as close as possible to the market-leader, only adding minor improvements like tagging of clips. video-quality seems to be slightly better than we are used to, at least for some movies. quick-jumping to parts of the video not yet downloaded actually works (which is a great plus). interestingly, soapbox uses ActiveX-controls to integrate Windows Media Player for video-streaming when run on Internet Explorer (other browsers rely on the Flash-plugin as usual).

as has been pointed out many times before, the technical challenge in building a YouTube-clone-competitor isn’t that big at all. the real question is if Microsoft will be able to build a community around its social video-service - a community large enough to draw attention and video-uploads from YouTube. leveraging its Live Spaces-community of currently more than 130mio users, I think Microsoft’s position ain’t too bad.

Competitious is a collaborative tool, helping project-teams to track competing websites in their market. just enter URL and name of a site and watch Competitious automatically collect traffic-data and related blog-posts both from the companies’ blog and from all over the web. users can create feature-lists to compare several services in a feature matrix. comparative traffic-data is graphed using Alexaholic (therefor limited to max. 5 sites per graph). users can track several independet projects and may share data with team-members. a bookmarklet is used to collect data from other sources - those so-called “clippings” are distributed among the team via RSS. keeping things simple & lean, Competitious might be a great timesaver for everybody in need to staying up-2-date in web(2.0)-space.

sometime last night, the Songbird-developers hatched released version 0.2 Test Flight, therefor lifting the Mozilla-based opensource audio-player officialy into Beta. Songbird comes with a built-in Wikipedia-plugin, a cool example of what the integration of browser & player can do: browsing artist-pages in Wikipedia, Songbird automatically offers all linked audio-tracks/samples for playback. the new Audioscrobbler-extension connects Songbird with Last.fm. unfortunately, Songbird is still quite a memory-hog - seems that’s what we need to get used to. binaries for win32, mac osx & linux are waiting for being tried out!

Tooum’s Switchboard (currently in public beta) is a free, hosted service integrating popular blogging-features with classic discussion-based forum-functioniality. although Switchboard offers only very limited functionality at the moment, the basic idea seems appealing and could very well lead to a solid Wordpress-plugin…

Scrapblog is a flash-based photo-blogging & -layout-tool similar to tabblo. starting a photo-page (’scrapblog’) is pretty straight-forward: just choose a template (there are not too many to choose from, though), upload some pics and drag&drop them onto the page. flickr-users will love the nice import-feature (take care, popup-blockers might interfere!), which even allows to filter for flickr-tags. [mashups like this are the reason I think flickr is still the king of photo-sites]

the layout-engine supports scaling and rotation of images, picture frames, text-blocks & -bubbles and layering of objects. the solid user-interface feels very much like a desktop-app, some glitches aside. f.e it seems to be impossible to fill predefined frames with photos, instead users are required to manually arrange frames around pictures. while the layout-engine allows multiple pages on a scrapblog, the pages itself are of fixed size with no ability to scroll.

Scrapblogs can be either kept private or made public, with the ability for visitors to subscribe to a particular photo-page via email or RSS. while each Scrapblog has its own feed, the application lacks a general feed syndicating all blogs of one user - this means my friends won’t take notice if I start a new Scrapblog.

check out my demo-page to get a feeling for Scrapblog’s capabilities!

The Museum of Modern Betas is dedicated to collecting new web-apps as they get launched into beta. sure, the concept of keeping websites in perpetual state of beta may be questionable (check yesterdays rant by dead2.0 ), but for cureless web-junkies, MoMB’s RSS-feed is their daily fix needed so bad - enjoy!

Fabrik - founded by two ex-Maxtor-employees - is a web-service offering cheap online media-storage to end-users, similar to products like fluxiom or Earthlinks WebLife. according to TechCrunch, Fabrik will offer data-plans starting at 3 US$/month for 2 GBytes of data and unlimited traffic - compared to the 110 US$ fluxiom charges for 3 GByte that’s quite a bargain. this also indicates, that both companies target different audiences.

feature-wise, Fabrik - currently in closed beta - looks promising: mass-upload of files is accomplished through a java-applet. files are categorized in pictures, music, videos and documents and can be tagged in addition. Fabrik-owners can keep files privately or share them with the general public. an integrated user-/group-management allows granular assignment of permissions.

Fabrik also plans to offer optional integration with NAS-devices by Maxtor. assuming that the local storage-device is automatically synchronized to a Fabrik-account, I think this feature would make perfect sense for small and medium-sized enterprises. when in-house, users can access data fast and without the need of a web-interface. on the road, they could access all data through the Fabrik-interface. however, Fabrik’s website doesn’t unveil details on such features yet, and it’s arguable if Fabrik will be able to offer its service at business-quality at this low rates.

thanks to lifehacker I received an invitation to HiveLive’s currently private beta. HiveLive is an online-collaboration tool allowing closed or open user-groups to discuss and share any kind of information. HiveLive organizes data in ‘hives’ - databases which can contain various types of items, f.e. blog-posts, contacts, bookmarks or photos. users are encouraged to create new item-categories and share them with other users. top user-created categories include ‘book-review’, ‘restaurant-tip’ or ‘movie-review’. hives can be kept private, invite-only or public to all users. data is posted to hives using a bbcode/wiki-like markup, which probably might scare off beginners - I’ld like to see a good richtext-editor instead. otherwise the user-interface looks clean and neat.

if you want to try out HiveLive, check if there are any lifehacker-beta-accounts left…

‘(Microsoft) Office is dead!’ - that seems to be the mantra of many web 2.0-apps. but can current web-office-applications really substitute an office-suite with a decades-long history of improvement and extension? over the next weeks, I’m going to review several popular web-apps to see if that’s the case, starting with Google Spreadsheets, which recently was introduced by Google Labs. while Spreadsheets is currently not actively marketed as a product, I bet Google plans tight integration into GMail, similar to recent acquisition Writely.

usability & featureset

basic editing-functions and many keyboard-shortcuts for entering data into the sheet are comfortably similar to Microsoft Excel. the product currently offers only very basic format-options like a few fonts, text- & background-color and text-alignment. more complex layouts are prevented by the lack of features like setting the border-color. Spreadsheet supports loads of mathematical and statistical functions, but misses to integrate contextual help on how they are used (i.e. Spreadsheets doesn’t display each functions arguments).

Google obviously advocates the paper-less office, since Spreadsheets doesn’t offer a print-function. trying to export to HTML and use the browsers built-in printing isn’t an option either, since the original column-widths are not reassembeld correctly. besides HTML, Spreadsheets exports also to .CSV- and Excel-files.
on an average Windows-PC, Google Spreadsheets is feeling quite responsive. supported browsers include Internet Explorer 6.0+, Firefox 1.0.7+ and Netscape 7.2+ - Safari is currently not supported.

import of excel-sheets

while many layout-formats are not imported correctly (f.e. basic things as cells spanning serveral rows or columns), Spreadsheet handles formulas and functions sufficiently, as well as regional differences regarding date-format and decimal point. graphs of any sort are not imported at all, special characters are lost in translation. in its current state, Spreadsheet does a good job importing excel-files mainly containing pure data, but fails miserably when it comes to adapting even basic formatting & layout.

collaborative features

spreadsheets can be shared (read-only or writeable) with other users simply by sending them invitations via email (all collaborators are required to have GMail-accounts though). what’s really cool is the ability for users to synchronously edit the same sheet. data entered by a contributor just pops up on the screen of each user currently working on the same sheet. an additional chat-sidebar allows live-communication between the collaborators. while the latency is quite low (about one second), I would appreciate if the changes each user made would be represented in different colors.

it’s important to note that Google Spreadsheet is not a finished product, not even feature-complete as a ‘beta’ normally would be. however, the user-interface looks very promising and the possibility of realtime-collaborative editing gives Spreadsheets a fresh twist. users of GMail will probably see the integration of Spreadsheets into the mail-application as an instant file-viewer sooner or later. until that happens, I recommend everyone interested in the state of AJAX-based webapps to try it out!