Overview Introducing Curio What is Curio? Curio provides an innovative, freeform, notebook-like environment with all the integrated tools you need to take notes, brainstorm ideas, collect research, and organize your tasks and documents. Curio's intuitive interface and tools encourage effective note gathering, research, and creative exploration. Its freeform, open environment encourages you to more easily visualize, associate, and recall information. All of this within a single application so you can be more productive, more creative, and focus on getting things done. About This Manual Because of its open and freeform environment, Curio can be utilized for a variety of tasks. This manual will guide you through the many features of our application so you can decide how to use them best to accomplish your goals. Editions Core ➠ Standard ➠ Pro Curio Editions Curio is available in three different product editions to match your feature requirements. Curio Core We start with Curio Core. As its name implies, it contains all of Curio’s core functionality including its amazing idea spaces; text, image, multimedia, and file figures; numerous collections such as lists and mind maps; and much more. Core is a great way to get started with the world of Curio. Curio Standard Next step up is Curio Standard. Dive into more features to really help you take your productivity to the next level with reusable stencils and templates; brushes & pens for quick sketching; more advanced PDF features; Calendar and Reminder syncing; Evernote integration; and our Sleuth internet assistant. Curio Professional For our power-users, we proudly offer Curio Professional. Truly a premiere product with master styles, stencils, and templates; consolidated task tracking; presentation mode; project password and automatic backups; plus much more. Edition Tags Throughout this document we will make it clear if a feature is only available in the Standard or Professional editions either using floating figures like those shown below, or inline text notations [Standard] [Pro], or we’ll color the idea space itself in the Organizer with a red or blue color label. Assistance Learn more about Curio What’s New The release notes for major Curio versions, such as Curio 9, Curio 10, etc., include fantastic in-depth explanations and screenshots of all the new features, so it’s definitely worth reading. Simply choose the Help > What’s New in Curio menu item. Release Notes Minor versions, such as Curio 10.1 or Curio 10.1.2, will include another menu item to quickly access their detailed release notes. Choose the Help > Curio Release Notes menu item and make sure to step backwards in history when viewing the release notes to see what else has been changed recently. Keyboard Shortcuts Choose the Help > Curio Keyboard Shortcuts menu item to see all of Curio’s shortcuts. Advanced Settings For the adventurous power-user, choose the Help > Curio Advanced Settings menu item to see all of Curio’s advanced options when you want to fine tune your environment. Zengobi’s Blog Choose the Help > Zengobi Blog menu item to read the latest news from Zengobi. Zengobi’s Forums Choose the Help > Zengobi Forums to chat and share with other Curio customers. Zengobi is Social Choose the Help > Zengobi on Facebook or Help > Zengobi on Twitter menu item to join us on those popular social networks. Contacting Zengobi Using the options available at the end of the Help menu you can send Zengobi feedback or ask us a question. We’ll write back as quickly as possible! You may also want to visit www.zengobi.com/support for more information. Installation Let’s get started! Downloading Curio is available from the Zengobi website. Clicking the appropriate download link will cause your browser to download the Curio application to its Downloads folder. Installing Drag the Curio application from your browser’s Downloads folder to your Mac’s Applications folder to install. Optionally, to create a shortcut on your Dock, drag Curio from your Applications folder to the Dock to create the shortcut. Updating Curio Curio uses the very popular Sparkle framework to periodically determine if updates are available. If an update is available, a window will appear showing the release notes and giving you an opportunity to have Curio download and install the update with just a single click. Curio will only check for updates available for your current major version. For instance, Curio 10 will find Curio 10.1 and 10.1.2, etc. But moving up to new major versions, say from Curio 10 to Curio 11, requires the purchase of an upgrade license so Sparkle doesn’t show those as available updates. We’ll send you an email when new major versions appear. We’re always hard at work on more productivity features! Trials and Licenses Taking a test drive of Curio Trial Period Curio initially launches as a 2-week, fully functioning trial of Curio Professional showing off all of its amazing features, with no limitations. At the end of the trial you can request a trial extension if you haven't already. License Key At any time you can purchase a license key from our online store which you can then enter into Curio’s License dialog, via the Curio > License menu item. After entering your license key, Curio’s features and functionality may change as appropriate for the entered key. For example if you purchase a Curio Standard license then Professional features will be removed from the interface. Likewise, entering a Curio Core license will remove Standard and Professional functionality. As a note, you can always purchase a crossgrade license if you wish to upgrade your Curio edition. Reader Mode If you decide not to purchase a license, you can continue using the product as Curio Reader for read-only browsing, printing, presenting, and exporting of Curio project files. The toolbar and interface will change to reflect this simplified functionality. At any time you can still purchase and enter a Professional, Standard, or Core license key and the interface will refresh itself to enable the appropriate functionality. First Launch Let the games begin! Welcome to Curio When you first launch Curio, this “Welcome to Curio” project will automatically open and display the contents of the Getting Started section. This is an excellent tour of Curio’s major features. We wholeheartedly encourage you to step through the slides to learn the basics of Curio in a fun, interactive manner. Use the Help > Open Welcome to Curio menu item to re-open this project at any time. Documentation The Curio product documentation is actually within the “Welcome to Curio” project as well, within the Documentation section. Keeping the documentation with the product ensures that it remains up-to-date and can directly reference actual Curio interface elements instead of relying on embedded screenshots.Use the Help > Curio Documentation menu item to access this documentation directly. A Living Document The “Welcome to Curio” project takes full advantage of Curio’s features so it’s completely unlike the usual static product documentation you generally encounter. For instance, many of the idea spaces in the Getting Started will ask you to interact with the figures on the idea space and settings in the inspector to completely understand what’s going on and how a particular feature works. Likewise the Documentation includes Organizer items which are actually live web views to video tutorials located on Zengobi’s website. This way we can continuously add new content to those pages and you’ll see the results immediately in this project. Curiota Curio’s amazingly talented little buddy Extend Curio’s Capabilities Curiota is a free companion app that opens up even more productivity with Curio. Curiota runs silently in the background, consumes very little memory, and has a minimal user interface: you just see a simple icon up in the menu bar. Click on that icon to create quick notes, or drag files and links to the icon to quickly add files. The most important thing is that Curiota uses an open system for storing notes and files. There’s no proprietary file format or database that could be corrupted. It’s your data and you will be always able to access it, even outside of Curiota, for decades to come. Curiota also supports print services (so you can “print” to Curiota), works as an macOS Share extension, is accessible via your Services menu, and is easily scriptable. All of the submitted notes and files are accessible and searchable using Curio’s Local library shelf, discussed below. More information about Curiota can be found at www.zengobi.com/curiota. Backups A quick note about backups Project Backups We have thousands of Curio customers around the world who use Curio for their important notebooks: work projects, personal projects, client designs, doctoral dissertations, class notes, and much, much more. We couldn’t be more thrilled and proud at what you’re able to create and achieve with Curio. With such important data please be sure to create project backups. Accidents happen, laptops are dropped or stolen, lightning can strike, bugs exist, and disk drives do die. Backups are easy to do, take only 5 minutes to implement, and are quite inexpensive for the peace of mind they provide. Please check out one or more of the options below. Curio Automatic Backups [Pro] Curio Professional users should take advantage of its built-in support for automatic backups. After setup, backups are stored in the destination folder of your choice. Curio PDF Mirroring [Standard] [Pro] Curio Standard and Professional support a feature called PDF Mirror which will create an automatic, cross-platform PDF representation of your entire project and store it in a specified destination folder.