Review: Curio 8 gives you more planning and presenting power
Equal parts project manager, vector graphics engine, digital notebook, and slide deck, Zengobi’s Curio 8 makes an ideal tool for anyone planning something big, complex, and multifaceted. Though it costs more than twice as much as the low-end version of Curio 7 () I reviewed last May, it packs plenty of potent new features within a pleasantly refreshed interface.
Rebuilt from the ground up for Lion and Mountain Lion, Curio 8 casts away the confusing multiple editions and feature sets of its previous version. For a single price, every user can employ all of the program’s top-flight tools and abilities. (This also eliminates any feature-set confusion in Curio’s top-notch help files.) Files from older versions migrate seamlessly into the new one, but users should keep in mind that Curio 8 uses a different file type that previous Curio versions can't read.
It’s easy to add a multitude of customizable, trackable elements to your project.
Within each Curio project file, users can create a series of Idea Spaces to house different aspects of their business presentation, lesson plan, novel outline, or photo scrapbook, among other uses. In a wedding planning guide, for example, one Idea Space can hold to-do lists, another the guest list, a third the seating chart, etc. Easy but powerful vector graphics tools and flow chart creators —here called “mind maps”— assist with the planning. You can adjust these and any other elements’ shapes, colors, fonts, and much more, and save your own custom templates for any element.
Curio lets you drag in not only photos and video files, but also live Web page views, Google Drive documents, and live-updating file previews from a host of programs, including Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Word’s heavy hitters. In Curio 8, you can now add YouTube and Vimeo videos, or record your own audio and video with the Mac’s built-in tools. You can also link a project to your Calendar and Reminders, even if they reside in iCloud.
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