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Curio 5.0
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Posted by Hugh
Aug 18, 2008 at 11:57 AM
But I like the coloured ovals… ;) More to the point, so might others to whom I try to communicate concepts and ideas. (Whether they, or I, like them enough for me to spend, say, US $249 on NovaMind Platinum, is of course another matter…)
H
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 18, 2008 at 01:40 PM
quant wrote:
>Could you please explain, why are you so excited about those “mind maps”?
>Every and
>any notetaking software that has a tree has basically “mind maps”. The only
>difference is that instead of all children being below its parent, half of them are on
>the right and another half on the left.
I have some ambivalence toward mind maps myself. For me, large mind maps (or diagrams) start to lose meaning. However, I do find that slapping together a diagram is a good way to start a project, because it creates organization of ideas without necessarily creating a hierarchy. Let’s face it, even a straight list is a hierarchy, as what comes first seems to have the most prominence (think of the list of actors in the cast of a movie).
Also, you can add other visual cues to a mind map that you can’t in an outline. For instance, say you are planning an marketing campaign and one of your headings is “advertising” and another is “target audiences.” With a mind map you can use an arrow or a line to connect which ads are targeted at which audiences. You’d need a columned outline to get the same idea across… and then it wouldn’t be as visual.
Nevertheless, mind maps are restricting, and that is why I’m excited by Curio 5.0. With Curio, I can build a small mind map to get started, then use outlines to add detail to each of the major nodes. For me, it is the best of both worlds.
Steve Z.
Posted by Randall Shinn
Aug 20, 2008 at 01:45 PM
Part of what looks so promising about Curio is that it is like a giant whiteboard on your screen. Not only can you generate text boxes, collapsible outlines, collapsible mind maps, various kinds of links, and connecting lines and arrows, but you can also put up information like photographs, videos, graphs, and so on that are drawn from material stored elsewhere on the computer. (And you can draw on it.) Want a photograph of something on your Curio whiteboard? Just grab it and put it there.
Many of the leading OS X information managers (such as Eaglefiler and Together) store information in non-proprietary formats (such as rtf, jpg, and pdf) that can be easily accessed by other programs. (Together, for example, can create a pdf of a website page that even captures background images linked via cascading style sheets [a challenge for most programs and print procedures].)
You can put a pdf file on your Curio whiteboard and annotate and draw on it. Since universities are increasing using pdf handouts (rather than paper), Curio has addressed the desires of students and others to be able to put pdf files onscreen, and annotate on them, however they want. This is similar to highlighting a text book and writing in the margins.
Version 5 addresses several shortcomings of Version 4, but I found that even Version 4 helped me sort out a couple of large-scale creative projects. I especially enjoyed the ability to throw boxes of text on the screen that addressed issues in other parts of the screen, and in at least one case I was able to see that the project as I had originally envisioned it had problems that were unsolvable without a complete rethinking. In another case I was able to pinpoint issues that helped me to drastically rework a collaborative project, and then do that reworking in Scrivener.
In sum, I think that Curio is a great place to think through creative projects, and, if necessary, share that information. And because OS X (Leopard in particular) offers so much ease of information sharing between programs, it is then easy to do work in whatever software program is best suited to that purpose. Curio can be an extremely useful module for a personal working system.
Randall Shinn
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 17, 2008 at 06:43 PM
The folks at Zengobi have added a short tutorial (or what they are calling a tutorini) about a very powerful feature of Curio 5.0: The spread PDF feature. Take a look:
http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/
The tutorial is on the bottom of the page linked to above.
Steve Z.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Oct 20, 2008 at 01:57 PM
I’m using mind maps more than in past - for me the advantage they give over a conventional tree is an ability to place items in different formats, using different map types, and this can make it easier to see relationships between items.
Visual depictions of information in various kinds of mind maps/diagrams may help to increase understanding or ability to hold a “big picture” view in one’s mind.
Daly
quant wrote:
>1. Simple, just create directory “Screen”, which would hold your not yet assigned
>relationships, and then drag drop to another directory creating relationships
>...
>2. those coloured ovals with text inside are not much different from the text in
>the tree alone ;-)
>
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