Curio and Kuler colors

Kuler, if you haven't heard, is an awesome community-based site for creating color schemes, hosted by Adobe.

Kuler has a programmer interface and I've had a to-do for months now to add Kuler to Curio.

Well, after reading this nifty post by John Nack I've discovered that Curio now has easy access to Kuler thanks to Lithograph's CocoaKuler.

CocoaKuler integrates into the Mac's system color picker, which is compatible with most Cocoa applications - including Curio - and some Carbon apps as well.


So, in Curio, after installing CocoaKuler, you double-click a color swatch in the Inspector or choose Format > Show Colors. Next, click on the CocoaKuler icon in the color picker.

You can easily find the most popular, the newest, or the highest rated color schemes. Resize the color picker window and you'll see a sweet CoverFlow-like interface for zooming through the available colors. Then you can click a color anywhere to select it.

Now you can easily create mind map colors where the various levels have complementary Kuler-inspired colors. Or find that perfect color combo by searching for "hot pink".

CocoaKuler is in beta right now but, if you work with colors, I encourage you to check it out!

Update: Looks like they've renamed it to Mondrianum and released a beta 2.

Curio and equations

Occasionally we receive a question regarding how to put mathematical equations into Curio. We have a large number of students, professors, and scientists using Curio so this is something that tends to come up fairly frequently.

While Curio doesn't include a built-in equation editor, I did stumble across a nifty method using a program that is included with Mac OS X.

If you look in /Applications/Utilities you'll find an application called Grapher. Launch it and you'll find a shockingly sophisticated 2D and 3D equation editor and graphing program.

To enter equations the first tip is to use the Equation Palette (via the Window menu) - I couldn't get the little drop down in the equation bar to work reliably for me. There's also a good amount of information available via the Help menu.

Once you have entered your equation you can select the equation itself and copy it to the clipboard where it is stored as a PDF image.

Paste that PDF image into Curio and you have a perfectly rendered equation which can be scaled to any size while maintaining full legibility.

You can also graph your equation in Grapher, of course, and then copy that as PDF and place that into your Curio idea space, as well.

Enjoy Grapher and if I find any more complete documentation for it (it used to be called Curvus Pro and was purchased by Apple), I'll certainly post more information.