Happy 13th birthday Curio!

Curio 1.0 was released to the public 13 years ago today: February 17th, 2004! 🎉

Work began full-time on Curio in October of 2002. What an exciting time in the Mac's history. It's almost hard to remember Apple as a financially lean underdog with a small audience. But you could feel the energy around the new Macs; you could sense that Windows was stagnating. It was definitely a time for disruption! It was a true gamble to create a new business and product for the Mac but it was also incredibly exciting and fun!

I dug around the archives (on CD!) to see if I can find some old screenshots. Sadly I can't run Curio 1.0 anymore because I don't have a PowerPC-based Mac sitting around!

Here's a screenshot of Curio 1.0:

And here's an old movie introducing Zengobi to the world:

According to CLOC, Curio 1.0 had about 60,000 lines of source code (not including comments). In contrast, the recently released Curio 11.0 has about 230,000 lines of source code.

Curio has certainly come a long way since that first initial release. I sincerely thank you all for your continued support and emails. Keep the feedback coming... more exciting times ahead!

2016 review

What a year! 2016 has to have been one of the busiest years in Zengobi's history! Let's begin our 2016 review and a brief 2017 preview... illustrated with a few helpful emoji! 😀

2016

Curio 10

Throughout the year there were several Curio 10 updates including a whopper Sierra fix in September (which was even regressed back to Curio 9) due to a change Apple made in Sierra's text framework which broke text editing on idea spaces (thanks, Apple). 🙄

Curio 10 is a huge success and I'm glad everyone has been enjoying all of its new functionality! I love getting emails from customers describing how Curio is key to their ability to truly get things done. Yay productivity! 🚀

Kagi

On August 1st, we had an out-of-the-blue surprise with Kagi's sudden shutdown. 😱 For those that don't know, Kagi has been Zengobi's primary payment handler since day 1. They've been a wonderful company to work with but, unfortunately, the terms of their closing necessitated a sudden midnight shutdown with no prior warning.

Sadly this occurred while I was on the first day of a 5-day family trip in the remote mountains. So much for a relaxing vacation.😭 Fortunately I was able to work out a fast solution with the awesome folks at Paddle so that the day I returned I was able to get an impromptu store in place to resume sales. 😘

Looking at the bright side, this was a perfect, if unexpected, time for me to massively upgrade our sales processes and back-end infrastructure. 🛠

Zengobi.com

Backtracking a bit, in 2014 I moved Zengobi from a super old WebIntellects-hosted server to an incredibly fast, self-managed Linode server. This has been a wonderful experience. I can't say enough good things about Linode. 💯

A couple of months later I ditched the old phpbb forums software for the slick, new Discourse-based forums. We love Discourse! 👏

Over the months that followed more security and firewall tightening was added to the Linode server to make it more robust.

Most recently, just a few months ago, I upgraded our Linode server from 14.04 LTS to 16.04.1 LTS and enabled automatic system updating so we're always up-to-date with emergency patches. 💪

I also got Let's Encrypt installed and working on the machine so we could switch over to secure https for general site browsing and downloads, including Curio updates. 🔒

Next, I need to get our Discourse forums onto https as well. Sadly our Blogger-hosted blog can't be switched over to https, yet.

Payments

Now that we're on Paddle's payment system I was able to make a number of major, long-needed improvements. 

Previously order processing was handled with local AppleScripts and a decade-old FileMaker database. It worked but was not robust to say the least. 😳

Now everything is hosted on the server. No more FileMaker as everything is in super-speedy MySQL. New php scripts have been created to handle everything from lost license keys, to upgrade handling, to order processing via tight integration with Paddle's order processing API's. 🙌

2017

Let me touch briefly on 2017 since a number of related events have occurred in the past few weeks.

Curio 11

Well, obviously this is the biggest news of 2017. Thirteen years after Curio 1.0's public release we have now released Curio 11. I'm so proud of Curio, in general, and of Curio 11, specifically, with all its new features and functionality. There's a related blog post here with all the details. 🎉

Website

With Curio 11's release we also rolled out a brand new website design. Much cleaner, with a greater emphasis on what Curio's all about instead of bombarding visitors with an overwhelming number of screenshots and slideshows. 😇

(Instead of screenshots, we guide the user within Curio itself with our fantastic new Welcome to Curio project -- a massively improved version of our old Getting Started project with integrated user documentation and sample gallery. Very slick!🌣😎)

Next Steps

Next, I'd like to create a gallery of short video tutorials perhaps even opening it up to user submissions if anyone out there would like to contribute videos showing off how they use Curio. 🎬

I'm also contemplating other user-contributed content such as styles, stencils, and templates. Still mulling this over.

Plus there are number of additions to Curio 11 coming in the next few months. Lots of awesome new functionality I can't wait to add. I'm super excited about 2017! 😃

Introducing Curio 11

We thrilled to announce that Curio now goes to 11. 😉

Back in late 2002 work first began on Curio and version 1.0 was released to the public in February 2004. I'm so proud that Curio is still going strong 13 years later with the release of Curio 11.

Curio 11 is a massive update so let's go over some of the highlights.

Editions

The first big news is that Curio 11 is now available in Professional, Standard, and Core editions. For those that remember we had an identical tiered arrangement prior to Curio 8 but moved to a consolidated, single edition -- simply called "Curio" -- from Curio 8 through Curio 10.

The reason and the key advantage was that a single edition was simpler to create, maintain, and market. However, a key disadvantage was that we no longer had a strong, low-cost edition for those that wanted basic functionality nor a version that could cater to the power users that wanted higher-end, professional features.

Fortunately we came up with a great solution. For Curio 11, Zengobi is still creating just a single application, just like Curio's 8, 9, and 10, but its interface can dynamically change based on the license key purchased and entered.

Downloading Curio 11 will begin a 2-week trial with all Professional features fully enabled and includes a bundled “Welcome to Curio” guided tour, complete user documentation, and sample gallery.

Enter a purchased Professional, Standard, or Core license key and Curio’s interface will dynamically change to reflect that edition’s features. You can even purchase a crossgrade from Core to Pro, for example, and once the license key is entered you instantly see the new functionality. You don't have to download a different app or anything like that.

Reader Mode

On a related note, once the trial expires, Curio will enter into a simplified Reader mode for read-only browsing, printing, presenting, and exporting of Curio project files and contents. This means we no longer have a separate Curio Reader application either.

So, one Curio 11 application can offer Professional, Standard, Core, or Reader functionality. Nice!

Note for Upgraders

For those coming from Curio 8, 9, or 10 you essentially have a Professional edition of Curio since all features are available to you in that release. If you decide to upgrade to Curio 11 you can choose whether you want to continue with Professional features or perhaps move to Core or Standard's functionality.

For those coming from a Curio version prior to Curio 8, we had Professional, Standard, and Core editions back then so you can maintain that same level or cross/upgrade to a different edition.

New Features

Now on to the new features!

Masters

Curio 11 Professional now has an ultra-cool new feature: masters! Specifically, master figure and idea space styles, master figure stencils, and master idea space templates.

These allow you to create a style, stencil, or template that is private to a project with the super ability of allowing changes to be broadcast instantly and dynamically to all uses throughout a project.

For example, create a master figure style and use it hundreds of times in a project. Decide you want to tweak the coloring or font and, with just a click, update the master style and instantly broadcast the change to all other uses throughout the project.

Same idea with a master figure stencil -- perhaps for a website prototype or a gardening or floorplan element -- which can be dynamically updated whenever you wish.

And master idea space templates are incredibly powerful. Create a master idea space template, styled as you wish with figure content including boilerplate items. Then use that master to create idea spaces. Change anything on a master and all uses refresh. You can even nest masters, or change an idea space to use a different master.

Auto Backups and Stencils Shelf

Curio 11 Professional can now automatically manage project backups for you for peace of mind. It also supports storing project assets in an external folder which sits alongside the project file which allows Spotlight to search your project’s asset library.

Sleuth Shelf and Stencils Shelf

In Professional and Standard, Curio now sports a slick new mini Sleuth shelf for quickly finding images, definitions, or inspiration. An updated Stencils shelf is also available with more functionality.

Tons More!

New features available in all Curio 11 editions include Organizer Trash and Archive for smarter temporary and long-term storage; figures with autolayout that can move and resize themselves when the idea space resizes; a new faster and more robust project file format; automatic Finder tags for project categories; improved Search and Library scopes; vastly improved multipoint orthogonal line drawing; text typeface and transformations; support for iThoughts v4 and MindNode zip mind map file formats; plus dozens of other features, interface refinements, and enhancements.

Please check out the Curio 11 What's New page for a great overview of all the new features.

Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra

One important note I wanted to add is that Curio 11 supports the same macOS (aka Mac OS X) versions as Curio 10. For those still on Yosemite or El Capitan, don't worry, you can still run the latest Curio on your Macs.

Enjoy!

Check out the Curio 11 overview for more information. This is a massive code release so I'm so happy to finally make it available. 😀