Product Reviews

This may qualify as the most creative and graceful program you install on your Mac this year. Although billed as an idea development environment, Curio is such a supremely inventive program that it could easily revolutionise the way you organise your creative thoughts.

Curio was originally conceived as a note-taking tool for ad agencies, but it has already extended beyond that. Each Curio project is centered around idea spaces - card-like canvases onto which you drag and drop media. Not only can you pull in images, text clippings and any QuickTime-savvy audio and video, but you can drag URLs from a web browser and even entire folders from your hard drive. Added objects or links become project assets and are held either as references to the original (updating as you edit or move the master copy) or as embedded files. Even if you embed, Curio is careful not to bloat the project. No matter how many times an asset is reused, only one instance ever exists, which makes updating assets easy.

However, Curio is more than a pretty asset management tool. It's a rudimentary design medium, complete with guidelines and an Omnigraffle-like shape-creation tool, and it's an unparalleled medium for jotting down ideas. You can enter text or draw directly onto an idea space by either typing with the text tool or drawing freehand with one of Curio's stylus types, including pencil and highlighter pen. It also has built-in support for pressure-sensitive tablets.

Curio makes it easy to organise information. Although you can use the toolbar's List tool to quickly create hierarchical numbered text lists, Curio supports a more ad-hoc approach to rearranging your jottings: you can select a group of discrete objects and through a single menu command, collate them into a list, which can then be re-ordered and moved as a unit. As far as navigational tools

ADVERTISEMENT

go, we've seen little better than Curio's Expose-like ability to shrink the current idea space so it fits in the available window by pressing the Q key. It's a feature surely other Cocoa applications are destined to copy.

Each project document has a supporting dossier, a text-based file where you can enter structured project information in question-and-answer form. Curio includes dossier templates for a variety of project types, including a creative brief and screenplay, but you can edit questions to suit your own project type.

There's no limit to the number of idea spaces that can be created and managed and reordered in a separate Organizer pane. With such flexibility, it's difficult to avoid falling into the temptation to make Curio a receptacle for all manner of ideas, but even this doesn't faze the program. Information overload is avoided thanks to a toolbar-based Search option that intuitively isolates the assets you need by dimming idea spaces and assets whose contents, filename or URL don't match a given search term.

A further method of tracking a project's assets is offered by the program's Library. This gives at-a-glance information about project assets, such as the application it will open with when double-clicked, and how many times the asset is used in the project.

Curio doesn't just provide a place to manage ideas: it's also an inspiring source of them, thanks to Sleuth, a built-in Internet search tool that scours the web for images, words or ideas to make your project sparkle. Matching results appear in Curio's own browser window and can be dragged onto an idea space, still retaining the link to the source website. Even here, Curio's flexibility is noteworthy: you can add other search sites to Sleuth simply by dragging that site's search result URL from a web browser into Sleuth's URL management window - Curio works out the correct search syntax.

Curio projects are easily transferrable: a menu option allows you to email a document as either a compressed Curio file - images are embedded on the fly - or a PDF. You can also export the document in most image formats or as an HTML file, with links retained, and Curio does a remarkable job of retaining the project's original layout within an HTML frameset.

Curio is highly recommended, but its $129 price tag is on the high side. While hardly overpriced, it will inevitably restrict its appeal to a smaller constituency than it deserves.