Updating your Zengobi RSS feed

Since Google Feedburner may not last for long, given Google's treatment of the Google Reader service, I've set up a new URL for our blog feed.

Update your feed reader so the link to the Zengobi's blog feed is this:
http://www.zengobi.com/feed
Currently it simply redirects to Feedburner but with this in place we can redirect it to a different URL when the time comes.

By the way, in Google Reader you can't actually change the feed. Instead you have to remove the old and add the above link as a new feed.

Thanks everyone!

Curio 8 and Evernote Business

Curio 8's integrated Evernote shelf works wonderfully with Evernote free and premium accounts. We've heard from many customers that it's one of the biggest features they love about Curio and is incredibly useful for accessing notes collected while on-the-run with Evernote's various mobile clients.

However, Curio 8 does not currently work with Evernote's new Evernote Business, which was announced in December.

A user with an Evernote Business account essentially has two note stores accessible via the same login: a personal store of notebooks and notes, and a business store of shared notebooks and notes. Currently Curio 8 will only show those items in your personal store.

There are a number of additional code changes we would need to make to support Evernote Business accounts including separately authenticating the user with their business store and separately retrieving their business notebooks.

More importantly, while your personal authentication is valid for 1 year, the business authentication automatically expires after just 1 hour which means you would need to be re-authenticated pretty frequently.

From a security and privacy standpoint, allowing a 3rd party app to access a corporation's shared Evernote Business repository also raises some issues and concerns.

While I investigate this further, please continue to use Curio's Evernote shelf to access all your normal Evernote notes but use Evernote's native clients to access your Evernote Business notes.

Curio 8.4 - relationship lines!

The #1 requested mind mapping feature is now in the just-released Curio 8.4: mind map relationship lines.

Select two figures in your mind map, right-click then choose Add Relationship Line, and a curved line with midpoint will be added to your mind map pointing from the first figure to the second figure.

It's important to note that this relationship line is a real Curio line figure and thus supports all the normal line attributes such as labels, coloring, width, arrowheads, scaling, dash patterns, etc. Style it any way you wish using the Shape inspector. Add additional midpoints. Add one or more line labels. Make it curved, straight, or orthogonal.

Here's another new feature in Curio 8.4 that will make lots of customers happy. Normally when re-arranging nodes in your mind map or list, Curio maintains the styling of those figures. This way you aren't surprised by Curio suddenly changing your carefully tweaked figure styles. However, now if you press and hold the Shift key right before dropping the figures then they will adopt the style of the branch they are being dropped to.

You can read all the details here in our Curio 8.4 release notes. Enjoy! :-)

Curio will automatically alert you that the new update is available. Or choose the Curio > Check for Updates menu item to grab it now.

Lastly, I should note that Curio 8 has just received 4 out of 5 stars from Macworld UK! Fantastic!

Listen to George on Systematic

I was the guest this week on the Systematic podcast hosted by Brett Terpstra. I had a great time discussing Curio 8, brainstorming, and keeping your mind open to new ideas. I had a blast doing the show and sincerely enjoyed talking with Brett about something I care so much about, both personally and professionally.

Quick flowcharting / concept maps

A customer wrote last week asking about concept mapping in Curio. The main difference between a concept map and a mind map is that the latter has a requirement that a child can only have one parent. With concept maps, a child can have any number of parents. The resulting map looks more like a freeform diagram or flowchart with figures connected to each other using directionless, unidirectional (a single arrowhead at one end), or bidirectional (arrowheads at both ends) lines.

Curio has a true mind map collection figure but we don't currently offer a general concept map container. However, they can be easily constructed using Curio's attached text functionality which we added back in Curio 6.4.


Simply by holding down special modify keys (Command, Option, Shift) and clicking you can expand your map with connected figures. This is a fast and fun way to brainstorm in a freeform way, without the formality of a mind map, directly within Curio.

And attached text was recently improved in Curio 8.2:
If a selected figure is a freeform-sized figure, then when creating an attached figure (by holding Command or Command-Option or Command-Shift and clicking), Curio will now make the new attached figure a freeform-sized figure of the same size.
and
After creating an attached figure we no longer auto-remove the figure if you don't type something into it at that time.
This makes certain types of freeform thinking maps, such as bubble and double-bubble maps, much easier to produce. Curio now includes examples of both as bundled figure stencils.

Happy brainstorming!

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