Several people at OSAF independently tripped over this: http://www.iscrybe.com/cal/index.html Currently, all there is, is a demo. From what I can tell of the demo, there's been a lot of thought given to workflow, aka 'What people need to know and what people need to be able to do in order to make the decisions they need to make in the order they want to make them.' 3 simple examples are: People like starting task lists from scratch. They even re-record tasks they already know about, but find it useful to jot them down again in the context of new lists with other new tasks, e.g. Things I must get to Today. Things I can get done while I'm waiting for my prescription. Things I need to get done to finish up the kitchen renovation. It's an exercise that helps you wrap your head around all the things you need to do. What's more is, not only do people like making new lists, they specifically do NOT like to retrofit new tasks and/or new lists into what they already have, half of which is probably out of date anyway. Most task managers don't accommodate this need for list-making from tabula rasa. Scrybe appears to, by providing import mechanisms to get lists from tools like spreadsheets into Scrybe's task manager (copy and past would be better). By 1) acknowledging that user workflows don't begin and end entirely within the confines of the app; and 2) building bridges to other applications users are likely to use, Scrybe will stand a much better chance of staying useful, up-to-date and relevant to users as a task management tool. ----- Task dates and Calendar All task lists have some notion of a due date. Many have a confusing array of due-ish dates. Start date. End date. Milestone dates. Check-in dates. Review dates. Post-mortem dates. Alarms. Recurring alarms. I have yet to see one that has thought to integrate dates related to tasks onto the calendar. If/When you assign a due-date to a task, how are you going to want to access that task again? When you're reviewing your schedule on your calendar. Scrybe doesn't let you see tasks as individual items on your calendar, but you can anchor task lists to a particular day on the calendar. ----- Fish-eye navigation in the calendar When your manager wants to know when you can realistically get away for a half-day offsite, how do you pick 2-3 days that work for you? + You start zoomed out, with a view of the next few weeks, to get a general sense of how packed your schedule is over that time period. + You identify 2-3 days that are relatively light, zoom into them to make sure there isn't some other factor you're overlooking, e.g. Next Tuesday may be light but I'm participating in the blood drive that same morning. + However, you still want to maintain a sense of context in the surrounding week because there may also be things happening before and after 'Next Tuesday' that affect its viability as an offsite day (e.g. Are you going to be out of town right before? Are there big due dates coming up right after?) ----- The next video promises to deal with Sharing and Collaboration. Beta is schedule for October, which is almost over! Mimi |
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