Curio - An idea organizer for creative pros
Mar 17, '04 10:01:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
Reader Adam Salter pointed me to Curio, this week's Pick of the Week. Curio is a Cocoa application designed to help create, organize, and manage a creative professional's idea stream. I'll be the first to admit I am not the proper target for Curio, and as such, I don't think I'll be buying it ... but I still felt it was worth a PotW mention due to the uniqueness of the program.
Curio acts as a searchable, organizable "idea bin," into which you can sketch thoughts on new designs. You start by creating a project, and then adding "ideas" to that project. Each idea can contain objects, text, and images, and can be organized using a nesting system very similar to folders in the Finder -- your top level idea might be "Home page for company X," and then nested within that would be "Contacts page," "Corporate info page," etc. You sketch the designs using a few basic tools (text, various lines and shapes, a stylus with five different tip styles, and an eraser). You can control the size, position, opacity, line and fill color, and a number of other settings for each object on the page. While it's not a full-blown design program by any stretch, you can easily "rough out" an idea with a fairly good level of detail.
What makes Curio quite powerful, though, are the features designed to help manage your collection of ideas. You can use a search box to find text on the various idea slides, a library of objects is built up for easy re-use on multiple slides, and a Sleuth feature will search the internet for items that match your search term. Matches are displayed in a mini-browser window, with all links clickable. When you see something that you'd like to use for inspiration, just drag and drop it from the Sleuth window onto your idea, and Curio will keep track of the object and its parent URL. Sleuth comes with a selection of predefined search locations in a number of categories (fonts, stock images, stock movies, reference, search engine, sounds, and translation). Using Sleuth, it's easy to find stock imagery for use in your ideas, and you can drag and drop just about anything from the Sleuth window onto your idea.
Finally, you can create a "dossier" for each project that lets you specify information such as date, version, who prepared the concept, and fill in client info, including a free-form section to hold business issues that you're trying to solve for the client.
Although the interface takes a bit of time to get used to, Curio is a very powerful program that could prove useful to creative professionals -- at $99, it's not cheap, but you can download a fully enabled 30-day demo to see if it's right for you.
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