Quick update

It's been a while since posting anything so I thought I'd give a quick howdy-do to everyone.

Still deep in Curio 7 development. My head is spinning with NSDates, NSDateComponents, and automatic date and time (!) calculations. Must... come up... for air. :-)

The wonderful emails we've received regarding Curio 6 certainly warm my heart. I'm glad everyone is enjoying Curio — it is a mighty fine product. Curio 7 is still months away but I'm glad everyone's looking forward to it, as well.

More news later!

Curio wow!

Curio has certainly had a very good week:

Today's Top Tech gives Curio a gold award and says he cannot live without it!

For Mac owners everywhere, we strongly suggest dipping into Zengobi’s world of Curio.

Macgasm calls Curio a powerhouse application for creative people.

Curio is an amazing program. I can’t think of another application that offers so many features and so much flexibility.

In honor of this week's back-to-back stellar reviews, we're offering a special promotion through May 19, 2010. Just enter CURIOWOW as the coupon code during checkout from our online store or academic store to get an extra 20% off!

Unplugged

Yes, I appreciate the irony of this posting as I am the creator of a computer application designed to help with inspiration. But, here goes...

I spent the past extended weekend at the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF) in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Camping, world music, dancing, great food, and tons of kids running around.

No AT&T service meant no iPhone. No electricity so no laptop.

The first day, last Friday, was admittedly a bit tough for yours truly; mainly because the US stock market had just collapsed on Thursday and I was dying to know what was happening.

But, I eventually began to like being offline. Sure I initially had a guilty feeling that I should be checking email or designing or..., but the fact that I honestly couldn't made that guilt vanish.

I could just focus 100% of myself on music, food, and fun with my family.

I felt a bit of a reset happen in my head and that was cool.

I talked to several other folks at the festival. Interestingly many of them were going through resets in their own lives as they were relocating or going for new jobs. It sounded like a lot of them were using LEAF to adjust their heads as well.

Coming back late Sunday I felt quite rejuvenated. Yes, my inbox was full but my head felt relaxed and ready to jump back in.

Anyway, I share that with everyone in case you're feeling suffocated with work. It's nice to take a solid, cold-turkey break, take a nice deep breath, and see the world anew without electricity, the Internet, your social networks, et al.

More fantastic flag icons

I haven't checked all of these out yet but I stumbled across this amazing collection of 40 Free Professional Useful Icon Sets for Web Designers over at Smashing Buzz.

All of these icons are simply stunning and several might make wonderful additions to your Curio custom flags library. Just make sure to download ICNS or PNG versions of the icons then drag them to a flag set created via Curio > Preferences > Flags.

Enjoy!

Italian review

A very nice review of Curio 6 by Maurizio Natali for Saggiamente. I wish I could read the native Italian version but the Google Translate version will have to suffice until I spend a few summers in Tuscany.

La bellezza di questo software è la sua incredibile flessibilità.

("The beauty of this software is its incredible flexibility.")

Just sounding out the native Italian makes me want to hop on a plane. :-)

A great big KISS

As I sit here hacking away on Curio 7 (again, set for release much later this year) I ran across an issue I thought I'd share with the world.

The #1 primary goal of Curio 7 is KISS. That is, Keep It Simple Stupid. That comment is aimed at me... not you guys, of course.

Or, a less severe way of phrasing it: is it as intuitive as the iPad?

The iPad is beautifully simplistic. Incredibly intuitive. Wonderfully.... (I'll stop there... I know you've heard it all before...)

If you've been working on Curio for 8 years (wow! can that be true?) then sometimes you forget to look at things anew and see if there's a more intuitive way to handle it.

On some issues I'm stepping back and saying "would my Mom know what to do here?". And, I'll be honest, the answer is generally "good grief, no".

So, we're putting on some iPad-colored glasses to look at Curio on the Mac for the first time and asking how can we make this better?

This will of course be an ongoing task over every revision of Curio but Curio 7 tackles some of the top issues.

Over the past several weeks I've been coding up a much more intuitive way to do something in Curio. It was a pretty big task and I finally finished it two weeks ago.

You know when you finish a long task, you really just want to let it be done? Sometimes coding is like that. Heck, it's always like that.

But, as I've been documenting the feature, I've caught myself more than once saying "wait a sec" and breaking back into Xcode for minor fine tuning.

Then, 5 days ago, I ran across an interaction that wasn't intuitive. And, sadly, the fix wouldn't be a quick tweak.

Arg! I'm soooo ready to move off this feature!

I caught myself thinking the worst things possible: "Uh, they can just do it the older less-intuitive way instead". "They'll figure it out." "They'll find the solution in the manual."

Plop down on the floor. Stare at the ceiling. Kick myself for not thinking about my Mom. Kick myself for knowing Steve J. wouldn't allow such behavior. And I certainly won't get a KISS for my dour thoughts.

Geez, and Mother's Day is coming up, isn't it? That's gotta be a sign...

So, yessiree, I promptly broke open the code.

Just finished it 5 minutes ago and I love it. :-)

Apple: the computer company

Hmmmm....

Regarding the Apple Software Downloads page there are reports such as this:

The most recent app listed under "Recently Added" is March 26th, and we've been told that developers who have sent in apps have not gotten any response.

The Apple Software Downloads page has been an excellent source of visitors for many small Mac companies like Zengobi.

Some theorized that Mac developers will be getting an App Store?

Many Apple Mac developers have been pondering whether Apple would ever convert the Apple Downloads library from its current format into one more resembling an app store.

There are some pros and cons about this idea but it is certainly intriguing as long as we can still sell software directly to Mac users, as well.

An enterprising developer decided to ask Mr. Jobs himself if we're getting an App Store:

Nope.

Well, that's settles that issue. Perhaps grand changes will be coming to the Apple Downloads library soon. Perhaps we'll hear about them at WWDC, the big Mac developer conference?

Ah, here's the WWDC announcement right now:

WWDC10 - The center of the app universe

Er. I'm sure they mean Mac app, right?

Gruber sums it up nicely:

Looking at the session list, one could argue that this year’s WWDC is an iPhone OS developers conference, not an Apple developers conference.

But, of course Macs will still be showcased at the coveted Apple Design Awards, right?

An application must currently be available on the App Store to be nominated and to receive an Apple Design Award.

Huh. Apple disses the desktop? Mac OS X is an also ran?

Admittedly Apple is certainly no longer just a computer company anymore. While sales of Macs have been fantastic and hitting record levels, they just can't compete with the iPhone universe.

Reminds me of a story I read recently. A father was telling his young son that he was going to buy a new computer for the family. This time an Apple computer. The son's response? "Oh, wow! Apple makes computers, too?"

I still think of Apple as that cool computer company that made my old 128k Mac. The one I learned C on. The laid-back, anti-establishment, anti-monopoly company.

The times they are a-changin'.

I still think Apple's products are hip and genius. I'm completely dependent upon my iPhone. I'm eagerly awaiting my 3G iPad. And, of course, I love my Macs.

It's not fun to watch an Apple die-hard like Jon Stewart rip into Apple but hopefully Apple won't completely forget how it moved from underdog to superpower and what caused Microsoft to fall in the opposite direction.

I'm crossing my fingers that WWDC11 will be where 10.7 shines upon the world and the Mac faithful have a chance to rejoice again. :-)

Update: Well what do you know? It looks like Apple is now updating the Downloads page for the first time since March! Could it be they follow this humble blog?

Inspiration through books

I love getting inspired through the pages of a book. Here are a few recent ones that wanted to pass along...

The Omnivore's Dilemma -- You'll never look at food the same way. A fascinating book that describes how food is made in America.

Three Cups of Tea -- Greg Mortenson is amazing and I think what he's doing for education in Pakistan is wonderful.

Stones into Schools -- This is Greg's follow-up book detailing the schools he helped build in Afghanistan.

Other books on my reading list include McEwan's Solar, Salwen's The Power of Half, McPhee's Silk Parachute, and Franzen's upcoming Freedom.

Check 'em out at your bookstore, library, Kindle, or iPad. :-)

Iconfinder

A customer just sent me a link to IconFinder which is a wonderful site filled with thousands of well-drawn icons.

Why should you as a Curio user care about icons?

Because you can download the PNG version of an icon and drag-and-drop it into a global flag set in the Flags preference panel, or to a figure's Decoration image well (found in the figure's Flags inspector) to associate an icon with a figure.

If it's a global flag then you can search on it via the Search shelf. If it's simply a decoration then you can't search on it but you can decorate your figures with colorful icons.

For instance, maybe you want to associate some figures with various social websites or different music instruments. Just download and drag-and-drop the PNG to liven up your idea spaces.

Enjoy!

Spring thaw

Spring is right around the corner and I'm certainly looking forward to it!

Seems like the new year is bringing lots of exciting products (here's looking at you iPad), conferences (HOW, SXSW, WWDC), and more buzz (Zengobi's forums) than ever before.

Lots of spring cleaning has been happening within Curio for the next major release (coming out much later this year), specifically with regards to the user experience. We're always trying to make Curio easier to use and more exciting right out of the box and this release will make huge strides in that direction.

Stay tuned for a wonderful 2010!

Zengobi store outage

It looks like our online store is down at the moment. From the latest news reports I'm reading, the Palo Alto area is experiencing a massive power failure due to a plane crash which may be related to these technical problems (Kagi hosts our online store and I believe they are located in that area).

We appreciate your patience as the city gets everything up and running again as quickly as possible.

Update: Wow! That was fast. Everything's running again now. :-)

Dropbox feature request

We have a lot of customers using Dropbox with Curio. Why? It's a great way to keep Curio project files in sync between home and work. Just store the project files in your Dropbox folder and all your machines have instant access to the latest version.

(Big requirement: make sure you close the project before opening it on another machine so all changes are flushed to disk.)

Dropbox also supports public folders for their registered users which is getting a lot of recent attention, particularly in the Zengobi forums. With a public folder in your Dropbox you can easily share a Curio project with lots of people. This is a great way to distribute information to your team, family, or colleagues.

One idea which is percolating is a method for marking a Dropbox file as "checked out". In other words, mark the project file as locked so you can make changes to it. Then check it in, or unlock it, so other users with access to that file can check it out and make changes, too.

This isn't simultaneous access -- since Curio doesn't support smart merging (yet) -- but it would be a great way for multiple users to share a Curio project as long as they abide by this one-at-a-time access control.

Turns out, this is not a unique request. Dropbox has a wonderful Votebox section on their website for registered users of Dropbox. You can vote for your favorite feature requests and their development team has a better idea of what they should work on next.

They have several very related feature requests currently in the Votebox queue:

• Stating if a file is open and locked in another computer
• Add the ability to lock a shared file so that others cannot edit it at the same time I edit it
• Check-in Check-out

Turns out lots of Dropbox customers would love this kind of functionality for all sorts of files.

If any Curio customers out there would like to vote on these issues we would certainly encourage you to make your voice heard by voting on their website. The Curio army can make their voices heard! :-)

I'm not trying to shirk Zengobi's responsibility here. Of course, long term Curio needs to support a smart merging capability. That way it can notice that an already opened Curio project file has been changed by someone else and can dynamically sync in the changes. We definitely want to implement this kind of functionality in a future release of Curio.

Personally I'd love a Dropbox API so we can integrate with Dropbox the same way we're integrating with Evernote. I've already cast my vote for that! :-)

Tablet dreams

A few customers have asked if we're working on a version of Curio for the tablet which is expected to be announced by Apple in just a few days.

The legal answer: even if we were we certainly couldn't admit it, right? ;-)

The honest answer: nope.

That said, I'm personally pretty excited about the announcement. If the rumors are accurate, which is always a major issue, then it should be a pretty cool product that I'd love to get. Both for fun and for professional reasons. :-)

Sighting: Macworld UK

Looks like Macworld UK just reprinted the Macworld US review of Curio 6 that came out a couple of months ago.

For those in the UK who checked out the review, please read this follow-up I posted on our blog regarding the US review. The Macworld UK review didn't make any corrections since the original US review so my blog clarifications are still worth reading with regards to list and table importing.

Aside from those corrections it's a very nice review and it's wonderful to get some international press! :-)

Curio Attached Text

Here is a brief demonstration of Curio 6.4's new attached text feature:

Simply select or edit a text figure then hold down the Command key and click elsewhere on the idea space to create a new text figure with a sticky line attaching the two text figures together.

Holding Command will create a single arrowheaded line, Command+Shift will create a double arrowhead, and Command+Option will create a plain line with no arrowheads. This is a great way to create quick flowcharts without the formality of a mind map.

Have fun!

Curio Lines

Here's a quick video tutorial showing off how to use Curio's sticky lines plus the new multipoint curved and orthogonal lines introduced in Curio 6.2.

Ho, ho, ho!

Christmas arrives a bit earlier this year. Enjoy 20% off any new or upgrade Curio purchase at our online store or academic store. Just use the coupon code MACSANTA during your checkout.

This coupon is only good through Christmas Day (December 25th in these parts) so take advantage of the savings before it heads back to the North Pole.

Happy Holidays!

Sighting: Right brain book building

The first comment on author Barbara Samuel O'Neal's blog discusses building collages with Curio:

I definitely Collage but I do it virtually with Curio (mac software from Zengobi). I’ve started with the paper way but it never really worked for me as well but Curio I love because of how you can layer images, change the opacity, use text etc. Plus no clean up required *g*

If you're interested in writing, then definitely check out that post and all the others on Barbara's blog.

Community: Master Screenplay

A quick note to report that we just published a fantastic dossier template, Master Screenplay, to our Curio Community Center. This was submitted to us recently by a customer and is one of the most detailed templates I've seen. It contains everything you need to ask yourself when creating a movie screenplay. Great job and thank you!

This is also a great opportunity for me to invite everyone out there to contribute dossier templates, idea space templates, figure stencils, mind map styles, etc. It takes just two seconds — just choose Send to Community Center from the appropriate actions (gear) menu or context menu. We'll skim it over and publish it on the site for all to enjoy.

Sighting: Macworld!

Macworld just posted a nice review of Curio 6.2. I love the intro:

If Zengobi’s Curio Professional 6.2 had a television commercial, I suspect it would be in the style of the late Billy Mays.

Yes, Curio sure can do lots of stuff... and more! :-)

In general they loved the functionality although the number of ways we have for storing templated data is justly criticized. That's an area I'm eager to tackle as well.

I added a comment to their review as follows:

Thanks Macworld for the review of Curio! We definitely plan to consolidate some of our template mechanisms (figure stencils, idea space templates, scrapbook, Evernote) in a future release to make it less confusing.

You can create lists (or mind maps) from standard OPML files simply by drag and dropping them into Curio. You can also paste a carriage-return separated and tab-indented string from the clipboard as a list by choosing Edit > Paste As > List.

Likewise, you can create tables by drag and dropping a CSV file into the idea space.

Yes, pressure-sensitive scribbles remain on a top "onion-skin" layer over all figures. However, you can select a region and choose Edit > Convert Selection to Image Figure and it will act just like a normal image figure within Curio.

Thanks again for the wonderful write-up!

George (founder, Zengobi)

And I thought it was awesome that they noted the new index card feature since that was a community effort in our forums. Cheers to everyone for the review!

Curio 6.2's coming 'round the mountain

I'm excited to announce that Curio 6.2 will be released pretty soon and is available as a preview right now.

What's new? Curved and orthogonal multipoint lines? Check. A faster way of creating new multipoint lines? Check. A slew of index card enhancements? Check.

Not enough for you? Oh, fine. How about a bunch of zapped bugs? Figure styles resetting in tables & index cards? Zapped. Fuzzy table lines? Zapped. Slow mind map rendering while editing? Zapped. Bunch of other little creepy crawly bugs? Zapped.

Read about all the goodies in the Curio 6.2 release notes. Then give it a whirl by downloading the preview releases of Curio 6.2 Professional or Curio 6.2 Standard.

How to Write a Great Novel

Over the weekend I read a pretty interesting article called "How to Write a Great Novel" printed in Friday's edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Since we have a ton of writers using Curio I definitely think it's a must read to see how some of the pros construct a novel. I loved the references to index cards and creating collages as that's a perfect application for Curio! :-)

Couple of Curio sightings

Here are a couple of nice posts I found this Halloween weekend:

Shane Mac's Blog

This is basically a must have (my top recommended program) and should be the first step in putting Microsoft Project into the garbage.

A Writer's Blog

But, then I happened to stumble onto the Zengobi site. That bliss [that] followed thereafter is an understatement…

Makes my heart warm... :-)

Curio 6.1 index cards video tutorial

Curio 6.1 with index cards has been released! And here's a quick video tutorial showing it in action:

An additional note is that if you select one or more index cards and copy them to the clipboard, or choose File > Export Selected Figures As > Text, you'll get a nice text output of all your notes which is great for importing into other applications.

Curio 6.1 includes another big feature for many of our customers: a new Decoration image well on the Flags inspector panel. Just drag-and-drop an image into that image well and it will appear as an adornment next to all your other figure flags. This makes it super-easy to quickly associate an image with another figure without needing to create a new custom flag via Curio > Preferences > Flags.

The key difference between a custom flag and a decoration? Custom flags are searchable in the Search shelf while a decoration is, er, simply a decoration. So definitely keep that in mind.

Anyway, Curio 6.1 has lots of other goodies (color pickers show the currently selected color, exported pngs/tiffs are transparent, smarter table cell pasting, tons of nasty bug fixes, etc) so please read the release notes to get all the nitty-gritty.

More features are coming so definitely stay tuned to our blog for the latest news. :-)

6.1 sneak peek

Oooooo... index cards.....