Community: Master Screenplay

A quick note to report that we just published a fantastic dossier template, Master Screenplay, to our Curio Community Center. This was submitted to us recently by a customer and is one of the most detailed templates I've seen. It contains everything you need to ask yourself when creating a movie screenplay. Great job and thank you!

This is also a great opportunity for me to invite everyone out there to contribute dossier templates, idea space templates, figure stencils, mind map styles, etc. It takes just two seconds — just choose Send to Community Center from the appropriate actions (gear) menu or context menu. We'll skim it over and publish it on the site for all to enjoy.

Sighting: Macworld!

Macworld just posted a nice review of Curio 6.2. I love the intro:

If Zengobi’s Curio Professional 6.2 had a television commercial, I suspect it would be in the style of the late Billy Mays.

Yes, Curio sure can do lots of stuff... and more! :-)

In general they loved the functionality although the number of ways we have for storing templated data is justly criticized. That's an area I'm eager to tackle as well.

I added a comment to their review as follows:

Thanks Macworld for the review of Curio! We definitely plan to consolidate some of our template mechanisms (figure stencils, idea space templates, scrapbook, Evernote) in a future release to make it less confusing.

You can create lists (or mind maps) from standard OPML files simply by drag and dropping them into Curio. You can also paste a carriage-return separated and tab-indented string from the clipboard as a list by choosing Edit > Paste As > List.

Likewise, you can create tables by drag and dropping a CSV file into the idea space.

Yes, pressure-sensitive scribbles remain on a top "onion-skin" layer over all figures. However, you can select a region and choose Edit > Convert Selection to Image Figure and it will act just like a normal image figure within Curio.

Thanks again for the wonderful write-up!

George (founder, Zengobi)

And I thought it was awesome that they noted the new index card feature since that was a community effort in our forums. Cheers to everyone for the review!

Curio 6.2's coming 'round the mountain

I'm excited to announce that Curio 6.2 will be released pretty soon and is available as a preview right now.

What's new? Curved and orthogonal multipoint lines? Check. A faster way of creating new multipoint lines? Check. A slew of index card enhancements? Check.

Not enough for you? Oh, fine. How about a bunch of zapped bugs? Figure styles resetting in tables & index cards? Zapped. Fuzzy table lines? Zapped. Slow mind map rendering while editing? Zapped. Bunch of other little creepy crawly bugs? Zapped.

Read about all the goodies in the Curio 6.2 release notes. Then give it a whirl by downloading the preview releases of Curio 6.2 Professional or Curio 6.2 Standard.

How to Write a Great Novel

Over the weekend I read a pretty interesting article called "How to Write a Great Novel" printed in Friday's edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Since we have a ton of writers using Curio I definitely think it's a must read to see how some of the pros construct a novel. I loved the references to index cards and creating collages as that's a perfect application for Curio! :-)

Couple of Curio sightings

Here are a couple of nice posts I found this Halloween weekend:

Shane Mac's Blog

This is basically a must have (my top recommended program) and should be the first step in putting Microsoft Project into the garbage.

A Writer's Blog

But, then I happened to stumble onto the Zengobi site. That bliss [that] followed thereafter is an understatement…

Makes my heart warm... :-)