Zengobi Forums

[Thommango]

Hi, I'm a total newbie to curio, but a long time user of OneNote and Evernote. I am very impressed with Curio. I've always thought that more shapes and mindmaps were a missing element of other note-taking tools.

But like another user mentioned, I think that Curio could be easier on the eye. It feels a bit busy and clunky. Here's the #1 thing that would help: Help me avoid making things ugly. It's too easy for users to blend up a mish-mash of styles and layer on gawdy flags all willy-nilly. Help me keep it slick. I'm trying to take notes not create art, but that doesn't mean I want my notes to look obnoxious.

I know that varying the colours and other attributes can help make notes more memorable. But ugly is ugly. It would be nice if Curio did more to help me steer clear of ugly. Two suggestions here: a) create page-wide styles. b) make flags simpler, cleaner and easier on the eye. I'm thinking they should be neutral tones the way Windows systray or Mac status bar icons are. Instead of showing four stars, show a star with a four in it.

Some other random suggestions:

1) a bit more polish on the UI. Maybe if the buttons had something to make the program look a bit more striking and styled - cleanly styled, it would help.

2) fewer buttons. For example, the inspector bar has 10 controls related to defining start/stop dates. I think this functionality that would be used rarely enough to warrant having it pop up when I indicate that an item has associated dates. I could even just find it in the meta info panel. I see that I can hide these things, but the default is very busy.

3) Better text integration. While it's important to be able to add maps, diagrams, etc., text is still going to make up the bulk of my notes. So it would be nice if Curio borrowed a page (hey, that's a pun, sort of) from OneNote. OneNote lets me highlight text, create numbers and nested lists in a text object. It also does automatic calculations in notes and lets me tag a selected passage within a note. These are all important features for me. Similarly, it would be great if I could highlight a passage and sleuth it.

4) Skip the project management stuff. MindJet is my favourite mind mapping tool, but I've wandered away after a number of upgrades because it seems like they spend all of their time trying to make it into some sort of project management tool. Curio feels like it might be coming down with the same affliction. There's no way a mapping or note taking tool could also be a good project management tool. So just stop. Forget resources. Yes, I can ignore that feature, but I think I would enjoy the product more without it. Also, when I see a product creeping in project management features, I get concerned about the focus of the company and start wondering whether I really want to commit to the product.

5) Rename "Shelf". It's an unintuitive name for the right-side panel. I see how it applies to evernote and scrapbook, but it doesn't seem applicable to the more commonly used inspector panel.

[mnmcook]

Interesting suggestions. However I am using tha "project management stuff" and find it quite useful. I might migrate to a different package someday that lets me integrate at least task management from Curio on the Mac to my iPad, but for now it's been helpful. I don't use the full up resouce management capabilities though.

By the way, I was a heavy OneNote user before moving to the mac. I think you will enjoy Curio, but will find it has different strengths you'll come to appreciate the more you use it and find what works best for you.

For me the hidden gem that was not obvious to me coming from the ON perspective is the concept of asset embedding and linking as part of your projects. Maybe ON had it and I somehow missed it, but that aspect of Curio has really changed how I perform my work in a much more intuitive and organized way than previously. The integrated project management with the ability to build projects with all the relevant material at your fingertips has been a game changer for me.

However I don't use it as many might for design and such as you might.

[jmh]

[george]

I appreciate your honest feedback.

One of the key priorities of Curio 8 is much less UI clutter. It'll be out in 2012 but I think you'll love it.

Project management is actually an incredibly popular use of Curio based on the feedback we've received here. Of course it might not be for you so certainly feel free to hide those controls if you don't need them.

Yes, I've seen some rather, er, "visually-challenged" notebooks here as well. We don't want to get in your way - after all this is YOUR project notebook - but proactively encouraging a better looking notebook would be great.

[danrhiggins]

I am glad to hear that George is looking at how to improve the UI in 8. There are some key guidelines:
- hide stuff when you don't need it but make it easy to find when you do. (Office 2010 in Windows completely changed the UI paradigm with the "ribbon" and confused a lot of people. It was too hard to find things.)
- Allow plenty of customizability which you somewhat do already.
- Maybe offer some mode-based defaults. For example a "mode" for taking notes, another for project management, etc. Maybe these are renewable (I know that's not a word) and customizable but it would give people a starting point and ideas.
- I prefer to get rid of everything that could distract from my focus. Note taking is a very different activity than reviewing/annotating imported material and brainstorming (whether by outline or mind map) is something else all together and then there is the project/task management. And all of these "modes" could be invoked in support of any given project.

[jjweimer]

[jjweimer]

[martinz]

[jjweimer]