Curio 14.2 is out

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Posted by Amontillado
Jul 18, 2020 at 04:51 PM

Curio 14.2 has been released, and I hate to sound like a shill but I really like it. Your mileage may vary, of course.

A nice improvement in this release is you can add subtitles to journal entries, so you can have just “Sat, Jul 18” under 2020/July in your Journal section. or you can have “Sat, Jul 18 - plans for world domination” as well as “Sat, Jul 18 - therapist advises against Napoleanic syndrome”.

I’ve found Curio to fit my outline style better than traditional stuff. It looks a lot like OneNote, and you can have as many hierarchical levels as you want. OneNote restricts to two sublevels. If I didn’t have Curio, I’d probably use OneNote. Imagine multiple text blocks on a OneNote page - it’s a pretty nice way to organize and make footnotes about side issues.

Since I can put a bunch of separate notes in close formation on a page, which Curio calls an Idea Space, I find I can outline without using levels. It’s like a series of Keynote slides, or a series of storyboards. If I think of each one as a “state of the story” at that point in the telling I end up with an outline that contains a plan but doesn’t push me into a rush to connect the dots.

That’s my biggest problem with conventional outlines. I start thinking of them as checklists and my writing gets stilted.

All good, then I had a Eureka moment, at least to the extent I’m able to find reason for running nekkid in the streets like Archimedes.

All objects (figures, in Curio-speak) have metadata including start, due, done, and duration settings. I had a group of about 50 notes and needed to create a timeline.

Aeon Timeline worked, but flipping back and forth between Aeon and Curio introduced errors.

There’s an easier way. I set a tag “timeline” on every note or index card I wanted to appear in Aeon, searched for the tag in Curio, and told Curio to save the search as a CSV file.

That file will directly import into Aeon, creating all the needed timeline events.

Neat. Very keen, but Aeon will also associate people, places, and roles in a timeline. OCD demanded resolution.

Everything in Curio can have an attached note. I use those notes to write text that will go in Aeon’s summary field for each event.

In the notes, I embed tags of the form “@@participant = Barney Rubble.” I can reset the title, start, and end dates, and I can write blocks of summaries and @@ tags to create multiple events from a single Curio figure. A quick Python script adjusts the CSV export from Curio.

Now I can go through a pile of notes and add timeline data and timeline tags. Search for the tags, export to CSV, run my script, and then import into Aeon.

That creates characters, locations, or whatever you want in Aeon, and it fills out the grid view. Happy, happy, happy.

Next I think I’ll write a script that will compare an Aeon CSV export to Curio’s CSV output and list the changes I made in Aeon. That way I can drag events around in Aeon and sync up my notes in Curio.

Fun stuff.

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