Curio 2.0 Release Notes

Title

Article ID

AR020000

Release Date

October 5, 2004.

Requirements

Requires Mac OS X v10.2.8 or above, with Safari.

New License Agreement

Please check out our new license agreement. Based on popular customer input, we have made several changes to our agreement which reflect new trends in licensing as exemplified by the fine folks at Adobe and OmniGroup. For example, you can now install Curio on more than one computer as long as it's for your exclusive use. This means you can buy one license and install it on your work Mac, home Mac, and laptop. We also now allow installing Curio on servers for network situations. However, like Adobe, we now restrict academic purchasers so they cannot transfer or resell Curio to another user.

New Features

Outline Lists!

You can now collect figures into a hierarchical list! Any type of figure can be in a list: text, assets, images, movies, bookmarks ... anything! Figures can be easily rearranged and indented (via tab and shift-tab or via drag and drop within the list). You can also apply an optional outline style for creating various types of bulleted and numbered lists. Combined with the flags, checkboxes, and ratings (all described below) you can easily create Top 10 lists and To Do lists.

Click the List button to create a new list containing any selected figures, if nothing is selected then a text item is automatically added to get you started. If you want to create a completely empty list, like if you want to paste items into a list, hold Option when pressing the toolbar button and that text item will not be added. For quickly adding new items, you can simply press Command-Return while an item is selected, or even while editing that item, to create another list item as a sibling under that item.

Flags, Checkboxes, and Ratings

Figures within Curio can now be tagged with one or more built-in graphical flags to make certain items stand out. A checkbox flag can also be added which can be checked and unchecked. And rating stars can be displayed to quickly see the top-rated items. Fill an idea space with new company names or logos and with a quick click flag them so the winners are separated from the losers.

Embedded Document Templates

Have you ever wanted to create a quick embedded TextEdit document or Photoshop drawing while brainstorming in Curio? To do this in the past you've had to leave Curio, launch the other application, do your work, save the file, drag that file into your Curio project marking it as embedded, then delete the original file. Whew! But no longer! Now you can easily create an embedded document for any application via the Edit > Create Document submenu. Curio comes bundled with several default templates for TextEdit, Photoshop, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and others, and you can easily add your own document files as templates.

Integrated Library

The Library has now been integrated into the main project window as a separate collapsible pane. Searching via the toolbar's search field now updates the Organizer, current idea space, and Library panes. You can also display additional sortable columns including date created, date modified, date added (to Curio), rating, preview image, whether the asset has an associated note, use count, and size in bytes. The Library can also show you where an asset is used in your project and allow you to quickly open an associated idea space. It's awesome!

Cross-Project Scrapbook

Also found in the new Library, a cross-project Scrapbook to place logos, images, files, or any type of asset that you find yourself using across many Curio projects.

Customizable Sleuth

Our new Sleuth interface allows sites to be rearranged, added, and removed. And you can even create your own Sleuth categories! All of your custom Sleuth sites are stored in Curio's Application Support folder so you can share them with colleagues and friends as well. For those search sites that use the GET style of submitting form data, adding it to Sleuth is as simple as dragging the search results URL from Safari. For search sites that use POST you'll need to do some digging on your own to find out what's needed but Sleuth's interface makes it easy to set up the Sleuth site once you have that info.

Grouped Figures

At long last you might say! You can now select multiple figures and group them so the group is treated as a single figure. A group can even contain other groups. You can also rotate and proportionally scale the grouped figure via the Inspector or its selection handles. However, if the group contains text items then you cannot scale it as text bounds cannot necessarily be proportionally resized within the surrounding group figure. Groups can contain shared assets and will automatically stretch or shrink themselves if the assets are changed or permanently deleted.

Locked Figures

You can now lock and unlock figures and grouped figures!
After a figure is locked you can only do the following to it:

Unlock it.
Copy it specifically as a PDF, TIFF, or Jump Target.
Set it as a default style for that asset type.
Open with Finder.
Open with Browser.
Double-clicking still either jumps to the jump target, plays the movie/song, opens in the browser, or opens in Finder as appropriate. However, you can't edit the text of the figure.

Locked figures are great for creating "background" items. Like storyboard squares or other elements that should remain static on the idea space.

Mini Mode

Sure you may think Curio's Full Screen mode is the cat's meow but wait until you see Mini Mode! With Mini Mode all of your documents are reduced in size, the toolbar is made smaller, the Organizer & Library panes hidden, and the windows are set to be "top-most" which means they sit on top of all other application windows. So you can be actively using Safari or some other application and Curio will be out of the way yet readily accessible for quickly jotting down notes. Using the new Navigator toolbar item and nifty Quick Zoom feature (the q key) you can jump to a particular spot on an idea space to add new text or drag and drop items from other applications. You'll love it!

Tooltips

Tooltips that show off nifty stats now appear as you move figures around, or resize them, or rotate them. If you simply hover over an asset figure a tooltip may appear letting you know what will happen if you double-click on it, its rating (if it has one), and its note (if it has one). These tooltips can be turned off and on via new settings on the Idea Spaces Preferences panel.

Other Idea Space Features

Figures can be filled with a smooth gradient between two colors!
Pressing the ] and [ keys will increase or decrease the size of the pen width of the selected figures. (In brush mode they still increase/decrease the size of the brush.).
You can highlight text with built-in or custom highlighters via the Text Inspector.
The text tool button is now a dropdown button with new "text box" and "yellow sticky note" choices to make it easier to create those types of text figures.
Press Command-0 through Command-5 to set the rating of the selected text and asset figures. A nice bezel window appears showing you the new rating and fades away.
Asset figures, like images for example, now auto-refresh themselves when Curio becomes active if modifications are made to that file outside of Curio.
The current drawing tool remains selected when switching to another idea space.
If you drag in a string from outside Curio which happens to be a valid URL then the resulting figure is automatically turned into an URL asset figure.
New Edit > Copy As submenu lets you choose to copy the selection specifically as a TIFF, PDF, Jump Target, or Figure. If you select Figure then it will only copy the selected figures and not automatically grab child figures if an item is a list parent node.

Other General Features

Curio can now Auto Save projects if enabled via the Preferences dialog!
The new Navigator toolbar control allows you to jump directly to a specific idea space without having to open the Organizer panel.
The context menu in the Library and idea space now have Open With submenus for assets and asset figures (Mac OS X 10.3 and above only).
When exporting, all created files have cross-platform safe file names in case you're exporting to a Windows machine for example.
When exporting a single idea space the default "automatic" filename is pre-filled-in.
Exported web links are now set to target="_top" so they open in a new window and not in the frame.

Notable Fixes

Idea Space Fixes

When selecting text that has a mix of text colors and if you currently have or previously had the Colors window up then your text colors are no longer reset.
The default font size for URLs, assets, and text are 14 point instead of 16 point. This can be overriden by the user via the Set Default Style menu option.
When editing text if the text isn't bordered or filled then we give it a temporary border so you can see the bounds of the editable text region.
When copying your selection the resulting PDF now has a transparent background and the resulting TIFF now has a white background (allowing nice pasting into MS Word!).
Tweaked Quick Zoom so if you don't move the mouse while quick zoomed then we restore what you were looking at before.
If editing text then we're now sending Command-UpArrow/DownArrow/LeftArrow/RightArrow to the text view instead of thinking they are menu actions.
If editing text we now put you in Quick Render mode so overlapping background figures are rendered quickly as you type.
If in scale-to-fit mode then the scaling is recalculated if the window is resized and/or Organizer displayed or hidden.
Snap guides snap to the nearest figures first.
Now disabling mouse coalescing when scribbling. This means we get every mouse movement which will make sketches look smoother particularly for slower machines.
When you hit Escape to end editing we now leave the last selected item still selected.
Option-dragging figures, particularly text figures, is now much faster.
Now smarter about redrawing the scribble region which should result in faster performance when dragging items around.

Other Fixes

Fixed the Organizer previews when a search is active so they don't flicker weirdly when selected or not. Also made the non-found items a bit more dimmed.
Simply selecting an item in the Organizer no longer expands it too.
New and improved Inspector mechanism should be more robust.
Closing a project wasn't releasing its memory.
Switching between idea spaces is a bit faster now since we increased the timer for closing and releasing previously viewed but unedited idea spaces from 10 to 30 seconds.
Mailing a project now shows a progress indicator so you know what's happening.
Before setting an URL associated with an image we now make sure the URL is valid (and isn't a JavaScript string for example).
Fixed some issues so Export works on 10.2 systems correctly.
While embedding all assets, if an error occurs (like an alias is no longer valid) we now continue embedding the remaining assets instead of stopping.