Curio 23 Release Notes 📖

Release Date

October 18, 2022

Requirements

Curio 23 runs on macOS Big Sur 11 through macOS Ventura 13 on Apple silicon or Intel.

Feature Availability

Features only available in certain editions will be listed with colored tags, like .

New Features

Custom App Icons

You can now change your Curio app icon! This is a fun perk only for Curio sustainers with ongoing licenses or subscriptions.

AppIcons

Improvements

New Master Markdown Styles

You can now override the body, italic, bold, both italic & bold, and highlight text stylings.

MasterMarkdownStyles

Tag Keyboard Shortcuts

Thanks to Curio 23's new Format > Tags main menu, keyboard shortcuts for tags are now being handled by macOS via the System Preferences > Keyboard > App Shortcuts panel. You can now set custom shortcuts for tags, stencils, and styles all in one spot.

This is a more robust and future-proof technique instead of relying on our previous 3rd party framework for shortcuts. Details on how to migrate your old tag shortcuts to the new technique can be found in the documentation.

While making these changes the Tags inspector panel has also been cleaned up for a better user experience.

MasterMarkdownStyles

MasterMarkdownStyles

Last Used Text Color

Improved the text color control so it remembers the last-used color. If you hold the Shift key then the text color control will show that last-used color and allow you to apply it to the selected text with a click. This is similar to how the highlight/background color control works so now you can easily apply a frequently used foreground or highlight color to your text.

On every project save, the project's unique identifier is now stored as a metadata extended Finder attribute. When resolving a curio:// hyperlink, if Curio is unable to find the project via its file path then it will use Spotlight to find the project’s unique identifer, specified via the new project ID parameter in the hyperlink. This allows us to magically find the project even if it has been moved, renamed, or is now on another volume. Hook will be able to use this to better support Curio deep links. (Hat tip to Bike!)

More Improvements

  • Tag Menu Images
    The Tags submenu that appears when right-clicking a figure and the new Format > Tags menu both show any assigned tag images next to their tags for quicker identification.
  • More Intuitive Sticky Lines
    Sticky lines are now a bit more intuitive. While dragging a line endpoint over another figure:
    (1) Stick to a specific connection point: hover along the edge directly over that connection point then release. It will remain stuck to that connection point even if the figures are moved or rotated.
    (2) Stick to the nearest connection point: hover along the edge near but not on any connection point then release. As figures are moved or rotated Curio will dynamically stick to the closest connection point.
    (3) Stick to the edge pointing towards the center: hover anywhere else along the edge the edge then release.
    (4) Stick to a specific point within the figure: hover anywhere within the figure then release.
  • Prune To Linked Collection
    When using Prune To Linked Collection on a mind map node Curio will now make sure the newly spawned mind map has the same layout attributes as the current mind map.
  • Smarter Alias Retry
    During a Curio session, if you go to the Finder to rename a file that is aliased on the idea space, when you switch back to Curio it will now automatically re-attempt the alias resolution to find the renamed file.
  • Smarter Inline Number Tag Handling
    Automatic inline tag detection will no longer consider a number-only entity as a new tag. So Curio is #1 will no longer trigger a new tag detection. However, number tags can be still created in the status bar or the tags inspector, then those created tags would be recognized if later typed as an inline tag. You can enable new inline number tag detection if you wish via an advanced preference setting.
  • Smarter Evernote Support
    Curio will now by default only show the Evernote shelf if you have the Evernote app installed. Also, you can now manually force Curio to not show the Evernote shelf even if installed.
  • Modernized Preferences
    The Curio > Preferences window has been refreshed with a more modern toolbar design, plus help buttons have been added to learn more about the various settings.
  • Status Bar Help
    The Status Bar has a new help button so you can learn more about how to use its features.
  • Toolbar Cleanup
    The default toolbar now has a special tracking separator item introduced in Big Sur. This allows us to separate toolbar buttons related to the Organizer on the far left from all the other buttons. For both unified and non-unified toolbars, as you resize the Organizer sidebar the system automatically scoots those toolbar button sections apart. More importantly, when the Organizer is visible, this allows a unified window's toolbar system to automatically spread groups of buttons (separated by flexible spaces) across the window instead of shoving them all to the far right 🎉. Finally! Unfortunately if you collapse the Organizer sidebar then Apple has decided, in their infinite wisdom, that the unified toolbar has to be right aligned (ugh, why?). A side benefit of all this work is that the default toolbar is now ~80 points smaller so it fits on smaller windows or MacBooks.
  • Selection Glows
    You can now turn off the blue glow when selecting normal figures or even all selection glows.
  • Organizer Tightening
    Made the gaps between rows in the Organizer a tad smaller, especially for Small previews.

Fixes

  • Quick Find
    Fixed an issue where Quick Find didn't refresh the query results automatically when switching windows or tabs to another project.
  • Status Shelf Rewrite
    Fixed a bunch of Status shelf user interface and thread timing issues with a significant rewrite to make it much more reliable. This includes fixing an issue related to figure tasks with asset URLs or link URLs being incorrectly written to the proxy project file making the Status and project galleries potentially inaccurate.
  • Journal Title
    Fixed issue with journal entries having the wrong default title if coming from a template. By default they have no appended title, just the journal entry date, but if you set Journal Adopt Template Title then it will take the template's title.
  • Daily Journal
    Fixed the Daily Journal journal template so it didn't have odd header figures.
  • Auto Layout
    Fixed an issue with automatically scooting figures closely underneath a figure. It now does a better job at recursively scooting other figures as the scooting cascades down. The related Geometry inspector checkbox has also been renamed to Resizes should move figures closely underneath which is more accurate.
  • Index Card Markdown Lists
    Fixed issue where markdown lists in lined index cards where not abiding by the lined spacing. The root cause was that markdown text figures weren't starting first with the paragraph attributes of the text figure itself and then applying master markdown styles to that, instead it was taking the general macOS text system defaults which meant it wasn't getting set line spacing values.
  • Inspector Focus
    Fixed issue with inspector focus between primary and secondary views not switching consistently if you directly clicked on figures within the opposite view.
  • New Idea Space With Current Style
    Fixed issue where New Idea Space With Current Style didn't work if the current idea space's template was a bundled template.
  • PDF Launches
    Fixed issue where double-clicking a PDF with an all uppercase PDF extension didn't launch Preview.
  • Window Title
    Fixed clicking on the window title popup to permit project renaming and also fixed Command-clicking on the window title to show the path popup. Choosing File > Rename is still flakey but it appears to be an Apple issue. Sometimes it works, sometimes not but Apple is responsible for that focus handling. To workaround their issue just click on the window title's dropdown button to bring up the rename field.
  • Default Preview vs Icon
    Fixed an issue related to asset figure default styles and the stored icon vs preview mode. For instance, now if your default style for PDF files (via Format menu) is icon mode instead of previews it will work correctly.
  • Organizer Disclosure Widget
    Fixed an annoying issue where the expand/collapse disclosure widget next to expandable Organizer items wasn't vertically centered.
  • Figure Groups
    Fixed issue where figures within a group that are ungrouped were still considered in a group in some situations so some inspector items may not have been available for changing.
  • Organizer Item Rename
    Fixed an annoying issue where single-clicking an Organizer item kept going into rename mode. Now to rename you have to double-click or press Return to go into edit mode.
  • OPML Import
    Fixed issue when importing OPML files with _note fields.

Technical

macOS 11 Big Sur Minimum

Curio now requires macOS 11 Big Sur as a minimum so new deprecations were cleaned up to better future-proof its codebase and it enables a slew of new internal memory optimizations. We're leaving the world of Mac OS X ("macOS 10") behind as we zoom into the future with macOS 11, 12, 13...

MacOSBigSur

More Technical

  • Background OCR
    When dragging images into Curio, text recognition is now performed for each image on a background thread dramatically speeding up drops.
  • Recovered Items

    On very rare occasions, a new Recovered Items section can appear on project load if Curio finds orphaned Organizer items (idea spaces, folders, documents) in the project's internal asset library. Generally this only occurs if a project is corrupted perhaps due to an incomplete cloud sync. This is loosely patterned on the Recovered Files macOS feature.

    Recovered Items

  • Sparkle
    For Curio distributed via our website, our app updating framework is now Sparkle 2.2.2 (way up from 1.27.1).