Snow Leopard and Curio

There are a couple of minor issues with Curio 5.4.4 and Snow Leopard. Specifically, text figures don't appear in HTML and image exports, and there are some quirks in the color picker so use Format > Show Colors as a workaround.

As soon as we pick up the release of Snow Leopard this morning we'll verify our fixes and get a 5.4.5 release out to the world.

Also, we've briefly postponed Curio 6's release to verify its compatibility with the release of Snow Leopard. You can expect it to appear the next few days!

Update: Curio 5.4.5 has been released so do a Curio > Check for Updates to grab it.

Curio 6 preview: figure stencils!

Time for another Curio 6 teaser: figure stencils!

Figure stencils allow you to easily create, re-use, and share frequently used figures and grouped figures.

It's perfect for boilerplate text items, or mind map, list or table templates, or various types of lines and arrow styles, or geographic maps, or floor plans, or garden plans, or UI prototypes, etc.

Just drag an idea space containing your stencils into the new Stencils shelf and, poof, the contents are snarfed up and stored in the Stencils repository where they are accessible to any project.

You can drag all the elements from a stencil to your idea space or double-click on the stencil to drill-down and find a specific individual stencil element.

Stencils can be organized into one or more custom collections so you can add a stencil to your Favorites, School, and Latest Project collections.

Like Idea Space Templates, Figure Stencils is a Curio Pro-only feature so there's another good reason to upgrade to Pro if you haven't already.

Stay tuned for more news about the upcoming Curio 6 release!

Art & Copy

Excuse the brief interruption to our Curio 6 update stream but I just watched this fascinating movie trailer for Art & Copy on Apple's Trailers site.

A significant number of Curio users are in the design community and I think this would be a great film for many of them to check out when it's released in the next few weeks.

It's easy to ridicule ads but you have to admit the great ads ("Just Do It," "I Love NY," "Where's the Beef?," "Got Milk," "Think Different") are examples of creative genius and the people behind them should certainly be admired.

Assuming the film shows some of the behind-the-scenes work behind these flashes of inspiration then it would be well worth the price of admission.

You can learn more and see the trailer in Flash form on the official movie website.

Curio 6 preview: search enhancements

I thought I'd mix up some big features, like tables, with some of the smaller enhancements we've added to Curio 6.

So, here an example refinement new to Curio 6:

If you use the Search shelf to search for some text that starts with a pound sign (#) then we'll look for the word as a tag. Thus, searching for #legal will do a search for a tag named legal. Note that normally text searching for just legal would return any results which contain that word in the figure's text, asset contents, notes, and tag. Thus, prefacing it with a pound sign is a fast shortcut to choosing it from the Search shelf's Tags list since it will only return an exact tag match.

Nice power-user feature, but let's go a bit further:

The Curio Spotlight importer has been updated to include any used tags and #tags with a project's scanned metadata. This means if the tag legal was used in a project then legal and #legal will be in the resulting Spotlight metadata for that Curio project.

So let's bring this home:

All of those changes means that if you use Spotlight to search for #legal, you'll see all projects that use the Curio tag legal, and if you then choose one of those projects from Spotlight's results list, Curio will launch and open that project and automatically do a search for the specific tag named legal.

Cool, huh?

This is great, personally speaking, because if I use Spotlight to search my machine for legal, I end up with way too many results. So, by using Spotlight to search for #legal, I can find only those places where I'm using the Curio tag called legal.

To take this a step further, one could use the Finder's Get Info Spotlight Comments area to add these kind of hashtags (to use Twitter's lingo). So I can add #legal to some of my non-Curio documents as a Spotlight Comment and they'll show up in Spotlight's results as well. For the über-organized, this is a pretty nifty way to go.

More Curio 6 teasers soon.... :-)

Curio 6 shipping soon!

Curio 6's release is right around the corner!

Filled with lots of big features and wonderful enhancements along with the usual potpourri of tweaks and fixes.

The big feature of Curio 6 is... tables!

Yeppers, native integrated tables. Complete with row and column headers and footers. Fully customizable style support so you can change the look of your table with a click. Cells support all the usual figure adornments such as checkmarks, flags, start/due dates, priorities, and ratings.

Easily drag images, text, weblinks, movies, and documents directly into a table cell from your idea space or perhaps another collection or even Safari or the Finder. Likewise, simply drag items out of your table to the idea space or another collection.

Want to create a quick matrix of photos? Create a table then drag and drop a ton of images to the table figure. Curio will automatically add rows as needed to nicely show off your images.

Want to show some Excel or Numbers data? No problem. Create a table then copy/paste a selection of cells from either app and paste into Curio. Curio will automatically grow columns and rows to encompass the pasted data. You can also go in the other direction: copying a selection of Curio table cells for pasting into Excel or Numbers.

And, of course, Curio's tables fully support CSV importing and exporting.

I'll talk more about the upcoming Curio 6 release over the next few weeks so stay tuned for more details. And all customers who purchased a new or upgrade license to Curio 5 on or after July 1st, 2009 will receive a complimentary upgrade to Curio 6 when it is released.