What's New in Curio 4?

Oodles of new brainstorming and project management features.

What's New in Curio 4?

Curio 4 adds fantastic new brainstorming and project management features within a new, modern interface. You'll find the functionality you need to throw away your whiteboard or notepad and switch to Curio!

1. Mind Mapping

The most requested Curio feature is here! Curio now supports native mind mapping collections which can contain any Curio figure including text, images, document assets, web links, and more. You can easily create custom mind map styles (and share them via the Curio Community Center) so that the mind map, and the figures on each level within, are styled to your liking. An idea space can contain any number of mind maps, and they can sit alongside of lists or freeform figures.

2. Updated Interface

The first thing you'll notice when you launch Curio 4 is its new look with its updated "Unified" interface style. Through the new Appearance Preferences, you can customize many of the colors used to draw Curio's interface. It also comes bundled with several appearance themes which you can customize and share with friends. You'll also appreciate the new Shelf, a fixed-width pane on the right side of the project window which contains the Inspector view, plus many other views which are discussed below.

3. Snippets

Sometimes when you're surfing the web, reading through email, or working in another application, you stumble upon a snippet of information, an image, a web address, or a document that would be useful for one of the many projects you're working on. Curio 4 includes a new system service that allows you to quickly save such a snippet for easy retrieval at a later time when you're running Curio.

Curio 4 also installs a new PDF service that allows you to print any document to a PDF file and store that file in the snippets repository.

4. Resource Assignments

Curio 4 allows you to associate resources with a project via the Project Properties dialog. You can add resources by dragging them in from your Address Book or a vCard file, or you can add them manually. After associating resources with a project, you can then assign one or more resources to any figure along with a completion percentage for each resource. Curio will show the individual images of up to five resources as figure adornments. If you have more than five resources associated with a figure, then Curio will display a single representative adornment.

5. Time Management Features

In addition to resources, you can now assign priorities, start dates, due dates, durations, and completion percentages for any figure on an idea space. But that's not all. Curio is smart about how it handles these extra bits of information, especially in a collection figure like a Mind Map or a List. For example, a figure's completion percentage can be specified manually or automatically computed based on the completion percentages of its child figures or associated resources.

6. Global Tag Sets

Curio 4 now supports global collections of tags that are accessible from any project via the Tags preferences. We even include a few bundled tag sets including a Getting Things Done (GTD®) tag set. To make tagging figures easier, tags are now available via the context menu, and you can now associate tags with idea spaces, too.

7. Advanced Searching

Curio 4 comes with a brand new Search Shelf that replaces the old Search Bar. The Shelf gives us room to add tons of new search criteria from which you can choose, including additional flags, tags, priority, start and due dates, and task resources. The new Search Shelf also lets you save searches for re-use, and Curio 4 comes with a set of predefined searches to help you quickly locate the items you need. For example, with a single click you can find all incomplete high-priority items due in the next two weeks.

8. Flashlight

Apple's Spotlight is very powerful, but sometimes cumbersome to use. Curio comes with a new file search feature we've dubbed Flashlight, which uses the same underlying technology as Spotlight. It's located on the Shelf and it allows you to quickly search your local hard disks for files to add to your project. You can specify the text to search for, the kind of documents to search, the last modification date of the file, and whether or not to search for the specified text in the contents of the document in addition to the title.

8. OPML Support

We're always striving to play well with other applications. To that end, Curio 4 supports the ability to import an OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file as a List or Mind Map figure and to export a List or Mind Map figure as an OPML file. We also added improved support for pasting an outline from OmniGroup's OmniOutliner as a List figure into Curio.

10. Mail Integration

Mail Integration Curio 4 supports a new way of handling pasted mail messages from Apple's Mail in an idea space, too. In Tiger, simply select one or more messages in Mail, copy them into the clipboard, then switch to Curio and paste. In Leopard, just drag-and-drop the messages directly into Curio. The mail messages are automatically embedded in your project, which is a great way to backup important project-related messages even if the originals are deleted.

Current Version Info

Curio Version 4.2.4
Release Notes
License Agreement

Mac OS X 10.4 or above is required

Current Curio 3 customers should see the appropriate store for upgrade pricing.

Special note: Curio Standard is the new name for Curio Home - same functionality but with a new, more appropriate name.

Curio 4.2 Features

Additional features added in Curio 4.2:

Voice and video recording.
Manual positioning of mind map branches. Curio will automatically make sure other branches do not overlap.
Leopard QuickLook thumbnails for asset figures in the idea space and asset inspector.
Press Option-Spacebar to see the Leopard QuickLook preview window for the selected asset figures.
Smarter resource "bubbling" to parent figures in a list or mind map.
New idea space background textures.

Curio 4.1 Features

Additional features added in Curio 4.1:

List titles.
One click screen snapshots.
Leopard QuickLook plugin for instant CoverFlow and QuickLook previews of Curio projects.
Integration with the Curio Community Center for easy sharing of custom list, mind map, and notepaper styles; dossiers templates; and Sleuth sites.
Lots of new bundled saved searches.

More Curio 4.0 Features

Additional features added in Curio 4.0:

You can now take advantage of native, Core Image Filter, and Quartz Composer transitions while presenting your project using Curio's built-in slideshow
Curio now includes over two dozen new and improved flags.
Adornments can be placed anywhere around the selected figures using the Inspector (except in lists where they have to be on the left).
The max adornment size has been increased to 128 pixels.
A new 'money' flag automatically switches between a dollar, a UK pound, a Japanese yen, and a European euro symbol based on the user's locale (the default is a dollar).
If an action, such as a jump action, has been associated with a figure then an adornment can be drawn to make it obvious that an action has been set. Clicking the action adornment will perform the action.
The checkmark flag will be automatically displayed as a percent complete pie-chart icon, rounded down to 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% complete, if appropriate.
"Sticky" lines get stickier with the ability to stick to the closest, or a specific, vertex or edge. New guides makes placing sticky line end points much easier.
Easily reuse figure styles with the new Copy Style and Paste Style options under the Format menu.
The Inspector's border, fill, gradient, text color, text highlight, and scribble color tables are now all customizable. Simply double-click a color cell in any of those tables to choose a new color using the standard color picker.
The new Brush Inspector allows you to control the color and size pressure-sensitivity, and the dozen most recently used colors in the current drawing session are displayed near the bottom so you can easily switch between recently used colors.
Convert scribbles to image figures, and back, using new Edit menu options.
Like mind maps, lists now supports customizable styles associated with the list itself and with each hierarchical level.
Curio now supports boundless idea spaces — gone is the 5000 x 5000 restriction. In its place, Curio shows you how much memory will be needed if you activate the pen and brush tools.
Easier idea space hyperlinks using the new Choose Idea Space item in the Actions Inspector.
You can now click the strikethrough button in the Text inspector to strikethrough the selected text.
New Insert > Date and Time menu items allow you to quickly insert date, time, or both.
You can now mark an idea space or a figure on an idea space as private via the new Permissions Inspector. That means it will not be printed, presented, exported, or published to .Mac.
Curio now remembers the scroll position and zoom setting for each idea space, and restores them when the project is re-loaded.