Are you planning complex and multifaceted tasks? If so, a program called Curio 8 will help you. Curio 8 is a project management application designed by Zengobi that promotes visual thinking and brainstorming. Curio is available for $99.99, and upgrades cost $49.99. According to Curio’s developer, George Browning, of Zengobi, the new version is “the most ambitious Curio release since its inception ten years ago.” Let’s confirm or deny this quote.
The Benefits of Using Curio 8
Besides its pleasantly refreshed interface, Curio 8 has plenty of powerful features. Among them are vector a graphics engine, digital notebook, slide deck, inline PDF annotations, improved Calendar syncing, and others.
Using Curio 8 project file, you can create a series of Idea Spaces to your business presentation, lesson outline, or photo scrapbook, etc.
“Mind maps” of Curio 8 is powerful vector graphics tools and flow chart creators that assist with the planning. But it is limited in the types of diagrams you can automatically create.
In Curio 8, the toolbar has been pushed to the bottom of the main window. There are 15 buttons in the toolbar. Just one button opens the menu to insert every possible element into a presentation. A new Share button exports your work as text, HTML, RTF, or PDF.
It is possible to adjust elements, their shapes, colors, fonts and save your own custom templates for any element. Several of the major figure types in Curio have been enhanced.
Curio is still a top mind mapping application. Outlines and mind maps are inter-convertible in Curio too.
Also, you can drag in any photos, video files (YouTube and Vimeo videos too), live Web page views and even Google Drive documents.
One more comfortable function in Curio 8 is “percent completed” markers to any element in your checkbox. It’ll let you know which part of your project is undone. With the help of Mac’s Contacts, you have possibility to assign various elements to different team members.
Downfalls To Using Curio
The first, we would mention the absence of ability to export a presentation to software format. Sure, you can import a PowerPoint into your project, just not the other way around.
The second aspect that needs attention is that Curio is currently not good at creating links from one Idea Space to another. The method is heavy and slow. A much needed function is the ability to automatically create a series of Idea Spaces each linked to a node in a mind map or list.
Another weakness is its disability to read fails made by previous Curio versions. In other words, files from older Curio versions migrate into the new one without any problems, but it is important to remember that Curio 8 uses a different file type, which can not be read by previous Curio versions.
Curio 8 is the fast-loading package with fantastic potential and tons of flexibility. Unfortunately, Zengobi has not released a Curio app for the iPad. You still should have your projects on Mac. It’s also Important to mention that you need Mac OS X 10.7.4 or later in order to use this application.
This guest article has been contributed by David Ritchie, a freelance technical writer. Currently David writes for Mac YouTube downloader.
