Tutorini: Overview

I just posted a new tutorini for everyone to enjoy.

It's a general overview of Curio's main user interface elements. So I discuss the Organizer, Project Center, the various shelf modules, Sleuth, Dossier, etc.

This is just a quick tour; details for each element will be covered in future tutorinis.

It only took like a bazillion restarts (literally!) since I kept flubbing lines. So, while it's not perfect, I'm counting on Curio's amazing functionality to speak louder than my words. :-)

Curio 5.2

Yeppers, here's another update that I hope everyone will enjoy.

1. Right-click on a line and add one or more midpoints so you can easily create angled lines.
2. Choose Edit > Copy As > External Hyperlinks so you can create a "curio://" url to a specific figure or an idea space that can be placed in an email, web page, or a third-party application. When the link is clicked on in that application, Curio will automatically launch, if necessary, open that project and jump to the idea space and/or figure and highlight it. Sweet!
3. Choose Insert > Variables to insert variables such as "idea space name" or "idea space date added" which are then dynamically replaced as appropriate. This is a really great feature when combined with the Idea Space Templates shelf.
4. The Scrapbook shelf now supports drag-and-dropped text. A huge request.
5. The Status shelf now support "Tomorrow" as a roll-up date, plus some other goodies.
6. The Search shelf has a revamped UI for more easily saving search criteria, plus some other goodies. 

To get the full scoop, please read the release notes.

Enjoy!

Tutorini: Spread PDF

I've just posted our first mini tutorial — a tutorini, if you will — on the main Curio page. This video introduces the Spread PDF feature in Curio 5. It also touches on a few other subjects such as creating idea spaces, adding assets, positioning figures, and creating text figures.

More tutorinis will be posted as quickly as possible...

Curio sighting: mind mapping

Chuck Frey, the guru of mind mapping, just posted this nice write-up of Curio 5 over at the Mind Mapping Software Blog:

I’ve watched this product develop for several years, when it was primarily a mind mapping tool for the Mac. But now it has evolved into a full-fledged digital notebook and project management tool that you can use to capture and manage a wealth of information, ideas and knowledge.

House work

So, I'm sitting here working on a bug (yes, I know... we try to nip them as quickly as possible) and I realized that hunting for bugs is a lot like House.

That is, House the television series here in the U.S.

I recently watched an episode of House since it was recommended by my uncle who's a radiologist. What a great show!

The show always begins with a patient who has a crazy combination of symptoms and then the diagnosticians get to figure what's the cause of it. They use an approach called differential diagnosis to come to their decision.

It's like that when tackling bugs. A Curio customer is experiencing a particular problem. I mentally list several possible causes of that problem. Then I have to ask the right questions, perform some experiments, etc, to gradually whittle the diagnoses down until I get to the remaining diagnosis.

Of course, I have the advantage of a debugger. But many times I encounter situations where the debugger isn't particularly useful. Specifically, when dealing with a bug I can't reproduce on my machine.

So, now House DVD's are in my Netflix queue. You can also catch some episodes on Hulu if you are so inclined.