Zengobi's Blog: Tutorini: Mind Mapping

Tutorini: Mind Mapping

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

I just put up a new video tutorini on the main Curio page which explains how to do mind mapping, how figure and level styles work, and includes a bit of Sleuth searching. All wrapped up in a nice 4:28 video. Enjoy!

We also recently released a quick 5.4.1 update with some fixes and a handful of little features, including Quick Look support in the Spotlight and Scrapbook shelf modules simply by pressing spacebar. Very handy!

And, since Evernote recently announced that Evernote Premium members could store any type of document within a note, Curio's new Evernote shelf in 5.4.1 now supports any type of format as well. We even auto-unzip package files, such as Keynote or Curio documents, which were automatically zipped when they were uploaded to Evernote. Plus, we added much better support for notes that contain a mix of text and one or more file attachments.

Have fun!

4 Comments:

George,

As an Evernote user I find the combination of Evernote and Curio potentially fabulous for my workflow. However, one suggestion and two questions:

Suggestion: The integration between Curio and Evernote that would really help me is the ability to save Curio documents directly to Evernote so that when my local Evernote repository syncs with the cloud and my other (Mac) clients I have my Curio docs available everywhere. Can you make this simpler?

Question: If I drag something out of the Evernote shelf into a Curio document and change it in Curio would the changes also be saved back to Evernote or would they be managed only in Curio leaving me with discrepancies?

Question: You mentioned that the Evernote shelf can handle zipped files such as Curio docs. Will this help me with my suggestion above?

By Anonymous, at 9:29 AM
You can actually give us some feedback with regards to Evernote syncing.

Evernote imposes a limit of 25MB on a given note. That sounds pretty big but a good number of our customers have much, much bigger Curio projects. How big, on average, are your projects? Just do a Get Info in the Finder.

Also, keep in mind that uploading a 25MB project over a cable modem can take about 10 minutes. And we couldn't just save "diffs" but we'd have to upload the whole project even if you just changed a single word.

We've also considered auto-syncing a PDF exported version of your project. Then you could even view the project on your iPhone since it supports PDF. Once again the problem is some exported PDFs can be very large.

Currently, pulling something out of Evernote and plopping it into Curio makes a copy of the Evernote note. We are investigating what it would take to make this bi-directional. It depends on the contents of course: are we talking about text notes, or embedded PDF's, Word files, or Photoshop files? Or a single note with a mix of all of the above? As you can see, it quickly becomes a complex issue.

The Evernote shelf can automatically handle zipped package files, like Curio project files. With the Evernote Mac client you can just drag a package file, such as a .curio file, into a note and it will automatically zip it up before it transfers it up to their cloud. You can then use the Evernote shelf in Curio to see those notes and the embedded attachment is automatically unzipped so you can Quick Look it or drag it into an idea space.

By George, at 10:48 AM
George,

Thanks for your quick response and explanation -- it's never easy, is it?

I usually have two kinds of Curio projects -- big research projects with a ton of embedded objects which do get pretty big. These would be a bit of a pain to sync as you point out.

The other type, however, is project management. These typically contain a few idea spaces used for brainstorming with mind maps, listing of ideas marked up with annotations, priorities, people assignments, etc. These tend to be much smaller and these are the ones that would be most valuable to me to sync.

Side note: syncing even large Curio files works OK for me with Eagle Filer/MobileMe. The nice thing about that is that I don't have to remember to drag files into Evernote. I just save it to the EF folder on my local iDisk and when I hit sync everything gets pushed out.

Anyway, thanks for all the work on a great product.

Rahyab

By Anonymous, at 8:28 PM
i have a problem. When i want to print my creation of curio with a mindmap in it, it only print the lines to the first subsection and not the other so my words are floating in the air.

What is the problem?

Thx

By Wheepapadowee, at 6:40 AM