Curio Pro 3.2.2 review
DownloadCurio provides the most flexible and powerful environment for gathering and shaping your ideas.
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Curio provides the most flexible and powerful environment for gathering and shaping your ideas. No other product on the market has the features and the intuitive interface to promote creative exploration.
Unlike notebook-style applications, Curio lets you place anything anywhere on the page.
Curio lets your mind run wild with an unlimited number of creative idea spaces. Create freeform collages of text snippets, images, movies, and sounds. Grab URL's, images, and text from the web, or files and documents off your hard disk.
Need to sketch out an idea? Curio's amazing brushes and pens allow you to create dazzling drawings and quick doodles anywhere on the page. Tablet users will find creative nirvana as many of the brushes are pressure-senstive, changing their color saturation and brush size on-the-fly as you press harder on the tablet.
Here are some key features of "Curio":
Shapes
Surround your ideas with Curio's flowcharting and mind mapping shapes!
Curio's group, text, and asset figures can be framed with rectangles, rounded rectangles, octagons, hexagons, trapezoids, brackets, vertical brackets, triangles, diamonds, semicircles, ovals, and clouds.
Many shapes can be further customized turning brackets into parentheses and clouds into super-bumpy clouds.
Outline Lists
Create outline lists and check lists! Any type of figure can be in a list: text, assets, images, movies, bookmarks ... anything!
Figures can be easily rearranged and indented (via tab and shift-tab or via drag and drop within the list). You can also apply an optional outline style for creating various types of bulleted and numbered lists. Combined with the flags, checkboxes, and ratings (all described below) you can easily create Top 10 lists and To Do lists.
Advanced Grid
With Curio's advanced grid you have control over the vertical and horizontal grid snapping.
Curio now includes new grid styles such as notebook, college-ruled, legal, quadrille, and engineering papers.
When using one of the notebook-style grids, text line height is automatically set to match grid height to complete the notebook paper look.
Flags, Checkboxes, and Ratings
Figures within Curio can be tagged with one or more built-in graphical flags to make certain items stand out. A checkbox flag can also be added which can be checked and unchecked. And rating stars can be displayed to quickly see the top-rated items. Fill an idea space with new company names or logos and, with a quick click, flag them so the winners are separated from the losers.
Instant Embedded Documents
Have you ever wanted to create a quick embedded TextEdit document or Photoshop drawing while brainstorming in Curio? To do this in the past you've had to leave Curio, launch the other application, do your work, save the file, drag that file into your Curio project marking it as embedded, then delete the original file. Whew! But no longer! Now you can easily create an embedded document for any application. Curio comes bundled with several default templates for TextEdit, Photoshop, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and others, and you can easily add your own document files as templates.
Pressure Sensitive Scribbles
The Curio paint brushes and pens will change their brush size and color saturation with pressure while you're scribbling on a tablet. The opacity stays set to the value specified in the Inspector. This combines the best of Apple InkPad (size and saturation change with pressure) and Adobe Photoshop (opacity can be set for a brush). It now feels much more like you're scribbling on a real-world sketchbook!
Integrated Library
The Library has been integrated into the main project window as a separate collapsible pane. Searching via the toolbar's search field now updates the Organizer, current idea space, and Library panes. You can also display additional sortable columns including date created, date modified, date added (to Curio), rating, preview image, whether the asset has an associated note, use count, and size in bytes. The Library can also show you where an asset is used in your project and allow you to quickly open an associated idea space. It's awesome!
Customizable Sleuth
Sleuth comes pre-loaded with tons of amazing reference sites, photo archives, quote services, font foundries, and other fun sites. But what if you have a particular site that you want to search that Sleuth didn't include?
No problem! Drag and drop a search result page from Safari or other browser and Sleuth will fill in the details automatically. For search sites that use POST you'll need to do some digging on your own to find out what's needed but Sleuth's interface makes it easy to set up the Sleuth site once you have that info.
Dossier Templates
The Dossier component of Curio contains an incredible collection of customizable question and answer templates to help you get started on your project. Choose Creative Brief for your graphic or print design needs, Video Production for your next video project, and Product Plan when planning a new product, service, or company.
Other templates include Screenplay for your cinematic aspirations, Science Experiments for classroom lessons, and Essay for your creative writing assignments.
.Mac Publishing
You can publish your project, or just selected idea spaces, to your .Mac iDisk to share with anyone! Your idea spaces are exported using Curio's wonderful HTML exporter (see below) then uploaded to your iDisk. In fact, multiple projects can be published simultaneously in the background while you continue working with Curio.
Curio will make sure only changed idea spaces and assets are exported since your last publish to maximize efficiency.
Sign up for a free, 60-day trial of .Mac
Exporting
You can export your Curio idea spaces as PDF's, TIFF's, PNG's, JPG's, or even HTML. The HTML support is simply amazing: idea spaces are exported as images along with all assets associated with those idea spaces. Asset figures found on the rendered idea space can be clicked on to instantly download documents, movies, and songs, loading them within the browser if appropriate. Web URLs and jump markers also work as you would expect taking you to the web site or idea space. Check out our Feature Tour sample Curio document exported as an HTML project.
Limitations:
All Curio editions will run without limitations for 15 days, after that time please visit the Zengobi Store to purchase a license key.
What's New:
Fixed problem where grouping a list and one or more other figures resulted in a zombie grouping that wasn't okay until you re-opened the project.
If you use gradients with start/end alpha coloring the figure is now transparent if shadows are drawn.
No longer auto-selecting a border size of 1 if you click on a shape in the Inspector.
Moved Show Rulers under the View menu instead of hiding it in Format > Text.
Minor tweaks so colors with opacities are now stored correctly in style information.
Fixed slowdown on project load where preview images for all idea spaces were being generated when they didn't have to be.
Fixed selection weirdness when you duplicate a figure.
Fixed another selection weirdness when you double-click on a list figure which has a jump action.
The Organizer has been tuned to be faster at opening projects.
Curio Pro 3.2.2 search tags