Curio 5.1

We just released Curio 5.1 with some yummy goodies that hopefully everyone will enjoy.

The big features:
- Project encryption for Pro users.
- Mega-über-super huge Spread PDF speed-up. A 700 page PDF now takes 12 seconds to spread.
- Date calendar popup for the date controls.
- Header and footers when printing with idea space name and number.
- Presentation Mode now supports the Apple Remote and multi-touch gestures.

A subtle feature that I'm personally thrilled to get working: Hyperlinks within a text figure now appear as links (aka blue text with underlines) even when not being edited.

And a bunch of other little fixes and features.

Curio 5.1 is a free upgrade for existing Curio 5 customers so go grab it! :-)

Overview videos

From over at our forums, Curio user DaveGaddis at BoundlessMe was nice enough to put together some overview videos of Curio in action. Excellent work, Dave!


Overview Part 1




Overview Part 2

Curio 5 is now available!

Phew. After months of hard work and long days, we're very pleased to announce that Curio 5 is now available.

Please note that it does require Mac OS X 10.5 or greater.

It's packed with a ton of new features such as the Status shelf, iCal Synchronization, Idea Space Templates, collapsible lists and mind maps, figure styles, beefed up Scrapbook, cross-project linking, the Inspector Bar, plus so much more!

We hope you enjoy it and spread the word to your friends and colleagues. Also, we hope you like the new website. Please feel free to drop us a line and let us know what you think.

Random musings

I saw The Dark Knight last Thursday at the local IMAX. One of the best movies I've ever seen, and I thoroughly believe Heath Ledger should posthumously receive Best Actor. I also felt the background music was incredible. My favorite you can sample here by playing song #1. You can feel the darkness envelop you. Definitely see the IMAX version since Nolan (aka Mr. Memento) filmed 28 minutes of it using IMAX cameras. I had to get in line an hour early since it's selling out like crazy, but it was well worth it.

The latest New Yorker has a fascinating article on how our brains produce insight: that "aha!" moment when you spontaneously figure out a solution. Sadly this article, "The Eureka Hunt" isn't online -- at least not yet. The trick is a delicate mix of concentrating on a problem, all left brain, but then relaxing or placing the problem set into the background so your right brain can produce that flash of insight. This background processing is key, and is why so many insights occur when you aren't actively analyzing the problem. Taking a shower, the scientists note, is a great way to induce this kind of relaxation.

I've had a yucky cold the past few days. I've never been good at sitting around waiting to recover so this has been a very trying time. But I'm getting in a lot of good reading. :-)

If you're ever in Durham, I encourage you to check out Blue Corn Cafe. Their creations always excite your taste buds -- even when you have a cold. Also, while in Durham, check out Rue Cler which is now one of my favorite restaurants.

Much has been written about Randy Pausch and his death a few days ago. If you haven't seen his Last Lecture then definitely watch it now.

I'm unbelievably excited about Curio 5. While admittedly somewhat biased, I do think it's pretty awesome. (Another teaser: embedded, interactive WebViews.) Its grand debut is right around the corner so stay tuned!

Update: Arg! I forgot that we already mentioned WebViews in an earlier blog posting. Okay... let's see. Do expandable/collapsible lists and mind maps whet your appetite? :-)

Curio in action

George and I have been buried in Curio 5 code for months now, but now we're starting to work on the other aspects of Curio 5's upcoming release such as the documentation and the new website design (being a two person company, we have to do it all). Yesterday, George's internet connection was down, so he brought the laptop over to my office/home and we had the opportunity to work side-by-side for a change.

George is working on the new website and he used Curio to mockup a bunch of different design ideas. It was a lot of fun to watch Curio in action and to once again realize what a great tool it can be. It was remarkably simple for us to throw some ideas together and then tweak them until we were both happy. In the end, he knew exactly how he wanted the site to look and he had stored several links to various websites with sample code available to help him write the javascript and HTML code necessary to make it a reality.

That's exactly the kind of brainstorming we had in mind when creating Curio. The new site is going to be awesome, too!

Another taste of Curio 5

As we continue wrapping up work on Curio 5 (due to be released in the next several weeks), feedback we've received from those who have seen it in action has been incredibly positive. Everyone seems genuinely excited about the upcoming release (not the least of which is yours truly).

One of the many cool new features added to Curio 5 is the WebView figure. That's right, an actual web browser embedded within your Curio idea space, and with it, a whole new world of possibilities.

A WebView figure can point to reference web sites, an internal company site, classroom exercises, lab monitoring pages, even Web 2.0 sites like 37signals' Basecamp, Google Maps, Google Docs, Flickr, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, and more! Anything that can go into a Safari browser can go into a Curio WebView.

Mmmm, delicious! Stay tuned for more info...

Curio 4.2.4

Howdy everyone!

We've just released Curio 4.2.4 with a few straggling bugs finally fixed. Grab it (pro, standard, k12). Enjoy it. Love it.

(And, of course, let us know if you have issues or comments.)

Why the silence on our blogs recently? The lazy, hazy days of summer? Dreaming of upcoming iPhones? Horchata recipe experiments? No way, mis amigos: We've been hard at work on Curio 5!

We'll start blogging about some of its features in the upcoming weeks. The short summary: it rocks!

Oh heck, here's a little nibble.... iCal sync. (Yeah, baby, YEAH!)

More news soon.....