Zengobi Forums

[colicoid]

First of all - wow.
I've been using productivity applications/PIMs for years and when I came across this one I thought to myself that these guys are really moving in an interesting direction.

I've only been toying with it for a couple of hours and started to run into some questions.

1. Many projects vs many nested idea-spaces.
At work I have many projects and they often overlap. I often find information from one project (possibly old archived project) useful in the latest project I'm working on. I noticed that there is no way to search for information across many projects, even if they are in the "project center". This seem to sort of take away the usefulness of projects (and therefor also dossiers) for me. So I guess I have to use one massive project called "work" where top level idea-spaces represent the actual projects. I am not sure what implications this will have. Please explain to me if I have misunderstood something or if there are some suggested workflow here.

2. Lot's of text snippets
A lot of the information I store is of a textual nature. I am a programmer so I have to store snippets of code, instructions for certain procedures and workflows, lists etc. E.g. code snippets are not really part of any specific project. They are just stored because I hope they might come in handy one day. I am worried that the graphical nature of Curio will make them take up a lot of space. Maybe thats not a problem but I'm not used to it so if someone has experience... How are you handling this?

3. Where are the templates?
So after trying out Curio I decided to get the pro version to try the idea space templates among other things. No templates... I checked the user community but there only a few there. Shouldn't the pro version come equipped with a sizable selection? And how do you add your own background images?

4. Searching inside resources
I have a bunch of online tutorials that I often direct people to when I give support. I have a need to catalog them and search inside them. So I tried adding one of them as a web archive but when searching for words I know it contains, nothing showed up. It seems that Curio cannot search inside it. This would be a very useful addition.

5. If Curio could automatically create hit records while I'm working on something else that would be useful too.

[george]

I'm happy you're enjoying Curio!

Some answers to your questions:

1. You're correct in that our Search only searches in the current project. Curio was designed around the concept of self-contained projects. For example, I find myself creating a project for a new feature I might implement. Or a designer might create a project for a client magazine ad assignment. Or a student might create a project for their notes for a specific class. While you could throw all your work into a single monolithic project you may want to consider if some of your work tasks could be in their own smaller projects. You can use Spotlight or Curio's own Flashlight shelf to search all your Curio projects. This will search all the text figures and asset figure titles. However, due to Spotlight limitations, it won't search within the project's package to find the contents of embedded assets.

2. Lots of text snippets will take up a lot of visible space but their internal memory/disk requires are pretty small. You could create a project call "Code Snippets" to recall those items. Since the snippets themselves are the contents of text figures then Spotlight/Flashlight would also find them. You could organize them into idea spaces such as "Memory Tricks", "Graphics Gems", "Debugging Tips", etc.

3. Curio doesn't come with any idea space templates but hopefully that will change one day. We certainly welcome any suggestions for templates and we'll continue posting templates on the Curio Community Center -- hopefully all of you out there will too!

4. This is another Spotlight limitation. It unfortunately can't search within some embedded files that require their own Spotlight importer. It can do certain items (PDFs, text) but not others (OmniOutliner, etc).

5. We'll work on the "create a hit record" feature ASAP!

[colicoid]

Quick response on the forum. Always a good sign...

1. I will give this a shot. The project catgories should allow me to keep track of super large amounts of projects hopefully.

2. It sounds like it could work out, I will try it.

4. If it can be done, you should probably add support for it. At least common files that a lot of people use. WebArchive, Word/Pages etc.

5. Good, I could use the money...

[colicoid]

Hmm, it doesn't seem to search inside pdf's at all.
Can something be done towards this?

[george]

That's odd, it definitely should. I just dragged a 1040 tax form into my Curio project and then did a search for a word I can see that's in there and Curio's Search shelf did find it.

Make sure the "Search asset contents for words" checkbox is checked in Curio's Preferences.

Also make sure you are typing a full word not a partial word.

Oh and make sure this is a saved project, not an Untitled project.

[colicoid]

I managed to get the search working.
That checkbox was already checked by default but I found what the problem was.

Not only do you have to have saved your project with a name. You have to save before you make the search. If you just drag a pdf in there and start searching it won't work. I found out when I switched to another project and it asked me to save, which I did. When I switched back and made the search again it worked.

I'm not used to having to save at all in this kind of application. Maybe its a good thing, don't know yet. By the way, it doesn't say how many levels of undo I have. The manual also talks about non-undoable actions (deleting idea-spaces). What other non-undoable actions are there? I guess it should tell me to confirm before making irrevokable actions. Otherwise I shouldn't have to think about it. Is that how it works?

I'm starting to see value in the fact that a curio project is a file that I can move around my system, put on an external drive etc.

[george]

You shouldn't need to save first. I just tested it by dragging a PDF into one of my projects then quickly searching for a word in that PDF and it found it -- all before I saved the project.

The only thing I can think of is that the asset wasn't scanned yet. Behind the scenes when assets are changed we use Apple's SearchKit to scan the document. Perhaps SearchKit hadn't updated its search index yet with that asset's information.

You can enable Auto Save within Curio. We support this on a per-project basis, so go into File > Project Properties and click the Auto Save Periodically checkbox and we'll auto save the project (roughly every 30 seconds depending on how idle the user is). You can also set the default for Auto Save to be enabled for new projects in Curio's Preferences by checking the checkbox in there.

In general we have unlimited undo. Each idea space has its own undo stack. So you can make changes in one idea space, then zip to another and make changes there, then go back to the first and undo just those changes.

Generally changes to the Organizer are not undoable.

And, occasionally, we have bugs that prevent undos for working as they should () but we try to fix those.