Thinking from Inside the Box

I just found a terrific article on improving the brainstorming process.

It's on the Harvard Business Review's website and is called "Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box".

I encourage everyone to check it out and definitely watch the video mentioned near the top of the article. Both the article and the video introduce a fascinating collection of questions to ask yourself or a group when working on a brainstorming challenge.

One key thing I like about the article is the understanding that creativity works if you define your boundaries. The article gets specific with their questions to encourage more focused discussions. That's actually the core reason why we created the Dossier feature within Curio: you need to know what boundaries exist before jumping into a new creative project.

Tip: maximize your workspace

Here are some useful Curio 4.1 tips to maximize your workspace:

• Press the ` key to toggle the display of the Shelf (that's the backtick/tilde key above the tab key).
• Press Option-` to toggle the display of the Shelf and the Organizer.
• Press Command-* to go into full screen mode. Via the Curio Preferences you can even make it so the toolbar goes into mini-icon mode or disappears when going into full screen mode.
• Via the View popup toolbar button you can have the Organizer auto-hide itself. When  you move the mouse to the left side of your window the Organizer will display itself. Move the mouse back over the active idea space and the Organizer will hide itself.

Announcing Curio 4.1

Greetings world!

We're thrilled to release Curio 4.1 with lots of cool features and fixes, such as:

• Leopard QuickLook plugin for cool Finder CoverFlow thumbnails and instant previews!
• List titles!!! (One of our most popular requests!)
• Instant screen snapshots!
• Integration with our Curio Community Center!
• Plus tons of other goodies!

Wait a sec... Curio Community Center?

Yes, you can now very easily customize and share your mind map, list, and notepaper styles, your dossier templates, your Sleuth sites, and your appearance UI themes.

Definitely check it out as we're very excited about this new sharing center. We can't wait to see what you come up with.

We have also opened the doors on our new Zengobi Forums, so you can discuss how you use Curio with other Curio customers. Perhaps you're a Creative, a Left Brainiac, or experiencing the joys of Campus Life, there's a community waiting for you to join.

And, as promised, we have released a minor update to Curio 3 so it runs on Leopard (although to do so sacrificed supporting Panther). Click a Pro, Home, K-12, or Basic link to download your appropriate update.

Enjoy!

iMacs

Greg and I both got new iMacs (24", 2.8GHz) late Friday. They came with Leopard "drop-in" discs so we had to upgrade them from Tiger ourselves. That part went fine.

But, for both of us, the Firewire migration from our old machines died. As in the iMacs just froze midway through the transfer. Fortunately, Greg's worked the second time but, sadly, mine still failed.

So, I had the fun of manually copying all the various directories from old to new via network. Gigabit is fast but it still took overnight to get everything over (while I slept, fortunately).

Anyway, we're loving the new machines. The LCD display is stunning. And Leopard is amazing. I'm having the best time with a bazillion of its features. While I had earlier doubts, I think Quick Look and Cover Flow are darn slick in the Finder. Spaces is wicked awesome to move apps onto their own "screen" and easily switch between them with Alt-Tab. And, the new photos mosaic screensaver is jaw-dropping. Even Front Row is fun to play with. Overall I give it 5 stars and well worth the upgrade from Tiger. Yes, even though migration assistant barfed the big one for me. Ah, c'est la vie.

Speaking of which, the Curio 3.2.3 release (aka Curio 3 for Leopard) is done but we're still doing some testing. And, we're readying a Curio 4.1 release with lots of nifty goodies that I'm sure you'll all enjoy. :-)