Curio 9 Released

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 2, 2014 at 10:05 PM

After firmly telling myself I wouldn’t, I’ve quite suddenly lost all my moral fibre and bought Curio. And I’m glad, glad, do you hear me!?!

Actually, I’m really impressed. Curio is just ridiculously omnicompetent. I’m using it to draft some copy for a new car campaign, and the dual-pane view, the high-quality word-processing, the amazing way you can ‘spread’ pages of a PDF file over a page (sorry, that’s an ‘Idea Space’) so you can write alongside them – it’s all very, very impressive.

Above all, I’m impressed by the many export options, plus all the sharing options. You could easily use Curio to manage a nice little brochure website or landing page – it produces relatively tight code with some sensible navigation features. Projects can be shared via Dropbox or over a network file server, and styles and ‘scrapbooks’ can be shared, too (in fact, you can share all kinds of stuff, but some of it is rather technical). Oh, and there’s the automatic PDF export option, too, whereby projects are shared as a set of PDF files that are automatically updated every time you exit the project. Bloody clever!

And, of course, it does various kinds of outlines – two-pane outlines, plus outlines within the main page (‘Idea Spaces’) – like OneNote – plus the dual-pane view, which allows you to run multiple outlines alongside each other. Or mind maps, or anything else you happen to feel like. Oh, and you can reconfigure the two-pane (primary+secondary) view so the panes are arranged vertically or horizontally.

Rarely have I been so overwhelmed by a program. Yes, there’s a lot to learn, but to be honest, I’m already finding it a lot more intuitive and straightforward than Scrivener, even though it has more features. It’s a truly superb piece of design – in many ways it’s a program that shows how future computing should work.

Having now worked with it in earnest, I have to say I would love to see an iPad version. And given the power of the latest iPads, maybe that’s actually feasible, although I have my doubts as to whether George could be persuaded… Nevertheless, the various synchronisation options (with iThoughts, MindNode, Reminders, Calendar and all sorts of other apps) are enough to be going on with (not to mention the auto-PDF output described above; the latter can be set up to transfer straight to Dropbox or OneDrive, and from there to an iDevice).

It’s really quite inspiring to encounter something that breaks the mould. You could almost say it’s what OneNote ought to be. Not to dismiss OneNote, of course, but Curio is truly awesome.

Cheers,
Bill