FAQ: How does line snapping work?

Curio's "sticky" lines feature allows you to connect two different figures with a line that stretches, shrinks, and repositions itself as you independently move the figures around the idea space. The sticky line feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it in Curio's idea space preferences.

To draw a line that sticks to a figure, simply select the Line tool from the toolbar, then click on a figure and drag the line to another figure. If you want to point to a specific point within a figure, you can hold the Command key down while you connect the line to the figure. To temporarily disable stickiness, hold down the Option key (Note: if you have sticky lines disabled by default in the Curio preferences, then holding down the Option key will temporarily enable sticky lines).

When you start drawing a line by clicking on a figure, the origin of the line automatically snaps to the center of the figure until you've extended the line beyond the borders of the figure, at which point the origin snaps to the edge of the figure.

To read more about sticky lines, check out the "Sticky Lines" idea space in the Feature Tour project that comes with Curio.

Poll: Voice recording

Greetings! Thanks to everyone who wrote me regarding Baby Cooper. He's finally getting better at sleeping through the night, so we're getting some solid sleep now. Oh, and his middle name is not "Tino" even though we do love Apple. :-)

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, we are interested in conducting polls here in the blog to get your feedback.

We are going to be trying out several polling companies, so please excuse any technical difficulties as we get the ball rolling.

We have received lots of feedback and requests for voice recording but we wanted to ask the wider audience what you think. Thanks for participating!

What do you think about voice recording?
	I'd love it!
	Pretty cool
	Okay
	Not that useful
	I'd never use it
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Speaking of movies...

Have you seen M:I:III, yet? George and I got a rare opportunity to get out of the "office" and hit the theaters this weekend. When we started our blog, we didn't want to spend all of our bandwidth talking about Curio, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to review Tom's latest action extravagansa.

For my money, M:I:III is the best of the series. It grabs your attention from the very beginning and holds it through the entire 2 hour running time. There are so many "impossible missions" in this installment that they eventually have to gloss over the details of some of them just to keep things focused.

Ethan Hunt isn't always on the job this time around. We actually get a glimpse of his personal life, where he's given up the life of the field agent and is now only training new agents. Attempting to establish a normal life for himself, he's fallen in love and is engaged to a beautiful young doctor named Julia, played by Michelle Monaghan.

But, the action begins when he's called on to rescue his star pupil, played by Keri Russell, who has been captured by the loathsome Owen Davian, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Hoffman excels as a truly terrifying villan. A man who's only emotion appears to be contempt. Cruise continues to impress as an action star capable of reaching emotional depths. Laurence Fishburn has one of the best monologues in the movie and delivers it with precision. In fact, all of the performances were excellent.

Like the previous movies, the story is simply a device for delivering one action sequence after another, but even still, it holds up suprisingly well. It's complicated, but if you think about the individual motivations of each character, it all makes sense, with one exception. But I won't divulge any details here, because I don't want to spoil anything for you.

M:I:III is an excellent way to start off the summer season of exciting popcorn movies. It's about escapism and adrenaline, and it delivers on both counts! If you get a chance, take a break and go see it.

Curio's making movies and music!

One of the best facets of this "job" has been meeting some really smart and super creative people. We recently had another opportunity to meet with two more dynamic Curio users, and we'd like to introduce them to you:

CK Barlow, a composer, performer, and sound designer, uses Curio as a project notebook where she tracks her ideas for a wide variety of musical and theatrical performances.

Michael Bauman, head lighting engineer on major motion pictures such as Munich, Syriana, and Good Night, and Good Luck, has incorporated Curio into a very unique workflow for designing and distributing his lighting blueprints.

It's very exciting for us to learn how people are using Curio to accomplish their creative goals. Be sure to check out what CK and Michael have to say about Curio!

You may get inspired.

Presentation and full screen modes

One of the new features of Curio Pro 3.0, and an extremely popular request, is a full screen presentation mode. The need for Curio's presentation mode becomes clear when you consider how brainstorming frequently requires collaboration and feedback from others.

Not that we want to become a Keynote/PowerPoint of course. But the need to offer presentation abilities is a natural fit for Curio.

Now, with one click, you can take your digital notebook and share it with others using the projector in your conference room.

But Curio's presentation mode doesn't simply project your idea spaces up on the screen. Here we offer a bit of extra functionality:

Press the S key to jump between scaled-to-fit and non-scaled images. When non-scaled, scrollbars automatically appear to easily scroll around the idea space.

Press the C key to show or hide the mouse cursor. When visible, you are able to click and highlight figures on the idea space to make them stand out. You can also click and drag the background of the idea space to scroll the idea space around if it isn't scaled-to-fit.

When a figure is selected, you can press 0 or 1 to 5 to assign a rating to the figure. Or press the tilde (`) to show the Inspector and change any number of attributes including assigning custom tags and flags to the item.

And, using the cursor you can click on checkboxes to check or uncheck the item, double-click on figures with assigned actions to activate that action, or double-click on asset figures to open them in their respective application. Curio will automatically hide itself and let the other application take over.

The presentation can be configured, through Preferences, to start on the main screen or a second screen. If you specify second screen, and it currently isn't hooked up, then it will go to the main screen until that second screen is connected.

I should mention that Curio Pro also offers a very slick Full Screen mode via the Window > Layout menu. Full Screen mode is similar to presentation mode but gives you access to the menu bar and optional access to the toolbar and Organizer (see Curio's Preferences). With Full Screen mode your project takes up the entire screen but you continue to have full access to all of Curio's available tools!