Tinderbox doesn't generate mind maps on the fly, based on a parameter-based query. I don't know of any "mind mapping" product that does that -- at least among the major players out there.

However, Tinderbox has the very powerful (and a bit mis-named) Attribute Browser view which can easily be used for examples like your Hatfield/McCoy investigation.

Curio 13 has a very powerful new feature called References. Using that feature you can link to multiple different objects (in current Curio project or another one) and/or URLs. I think the documentation on this feature is a bit sparse, but it's quite wonderful. I don't know if this will fulfill @Amontillado 's needs, but it's certainly worth exploring.

Links are from a "thing" in Curio to another "thing". Links/references can be colored by tags that you create.

Interesting - 20 minutes ago as I drove to lunch I was thinking that if one object could link to another, I'd probably have to grab a copy. Otherwise, I am truthfully happy and productive with tools like Devonthink.

I have a new project to write, so this is a good time to give Curio a spin. It's certainly has a polished look.

Thanks for the info, Matthew.



mathew wrote:

Curio 13 has a very powerful new feature called References. Using that
feature you can link to multiple different objects (in current Curio
project or another one) and/or URLs. I think the documentation on this
feature is a bit sparse, but it's quite wonderful. I don't know if this
will fulfill @Amontillado 's needs, but it's certainly worth exploring.

Links are from a "thing" in Curio to another "thing". Links/references
can be colored by tags that you create.

If you run into any problems, let me know. I can work up a short video on how it all works. It confused me at first. But once you know how it works it's quite elegant.

Very generous of you, Matthew.

The first clue that Curio is awesome is Zengobi writes product documentation in Curio. That old saw about eating your own dog food is true. If you have to use the tools you develop, you'll develop better, more useful, tools.

I see one minor divergence in Curio from its documentation, and I take that as a sign the company is thinking on its feet. That's a good thing.

You're supposed to be able to create an empty project by option-clicking a Project button, but the option key doesn't seem to make any difference. No biggie. I think you can just delete the initial ideaspace and have an empty project.

I don't like subscriptions, particularly as expensive as Curio, but I can see an argument for it in Curio's case. This is the 13th major version, assuming the numbering matches releases, and the initial copyright was 2003. If there's a significant version jump every year or so, that takes the sting out of subscriptions.

If the company goes belly-up, I hope they would trade permanent licenses for subscriptions. Worst case, they sell permanent licenses.

I'm considering the subscription for myself, because if I use a product I always buy upgrades.

I still couldn't do without Devonthink, but it's a different tool with different strengths.

Here's why I would not subscribe to Curio. Zengobi is very responsive to user requests (that is, George Browning -- who is the entirely of Zengobi.) As as result, George is frequently making minor additions to Curio, and making those available to users in a "preview" channel.

If you subscribe through the App Store, you will not be able to participate in the preview channel and will have less opportunity to suggest changes before the previews are baked and incorporated in the updates available from Zengobi or the App Store subscribers.

It's a personal preference, but I've always found that being able to work with the previews is interesting and it helps George make better products.

Also, Zengobi historically offers good discounts on upgrade pricing and is very generous with trials.

Good to know, Paul.

So far, I find myself thinking that Curio is what One Note should have been. It's more flexible, all the figure types, etc., it's just good stuff.

It's got some quirks. I wouldn't say I've found any bugs, but you have to learn how some things work. For example, open a Curio project and click on an Organizer entry (an idea space). The Meta button will show the meta info for the idea space. Now click into a figure. The meta button will show metadata for the figure. All cool.

Now click back on an Organizer entry, and the meta button will still be in "figure" mode, not "idea space" mode. Clicking on an Organizer entry doesn't change the context of the meta button.

Curio is very nice. I'm dead set on either a subscription or a purchase, and I'll get the full-up Pro version. It's more than I arguably need, but when it comes to software like this, too much is never enough.

The references feature Matthew mentioned in an earlier post is very, very cool. You can follow a references to or from any figure. It's almost like jump thoughts in The Brain, which I have long thought were genius. Since references in Curio are at the figure (object) level, they have utility beyond what The Brain offers in that regard.

Clay tablets and artfully trimmed wood stylii are all anyone needs to write. Things like Curio sure streamline the process, though. I'm going to enjoy using it.

Wow - note the time stamps on my last post and this one. In that interim, I sent email to Zengobi with observations about Curio _and_ got a nice reply back from George.

The product is great, features like References are well thought out, and the company is quick and thoughtful with customer support. Nice!

For me the main reason to purchase the Pro version is you get the "Spread PDF" feature. I work at a University. This feature allows me to easily create a "template" of how I want one page in the PDF to look: e.g. PDF page taking up about 33% of the page, a clear area for added instructor notes, and so on. Then I click on Spread PDF and that self-created template for one page gets replicated throughout the whole PDF: no matter whether the PDF is 2 or 200 pages. Very very helpful. However, that feature is now included in the Standard version for 13.

The references and cross-references features I believe are only in Pro.

If you are an educator then the price is even better. Academic price for Pro is $90, but academic upgrades are $50 for Pro. And you need not upgrade with each new addition. Pick and choose when there are added features that make an upgrade worthwhile to you.

I endorse all of this - Curio is a marvellous product and George's support is a marvel in itself

Paul Korm wrote:

Here's why I would not subscribe to Curio. Zengobi is very responsive
to user requests (that is, George Browning -- who is the entirely of
Zengobi.) As as result, George is frequently making minor additions to
Curio, and making those available to users in a "preview" channel.

If you subscribe through the App Store, you will not be able to
participate in the preview channel and will have less opportunity to
suggest changes before the previews are baked and incorporated in the
updates available from Zengobi or the App Store subscribers.

It's a personal preference, but I've always found that being able to
work with the previews is interesting and it helps George make better
products.

Also, Zengobi historically offers good discounts on upgrade pricing and
is very generous with trials.

For those interested Curio is having a 30% off (Black Friday) sale. See:
https://www.zengobi.com/curio/#editions

I’d love to see a video. I’m desperate for resources about how others use Curio.

Ditto this. Curio is not really that complex, once you get into it. It's more flexible than complex. You can think of it as Microsoft One Note on steroids, and you're not far off from what it is.

Some things took a little head scratching, like how to turn a text box "figure" (object) into Markdown. It's easy - a Markdown button appears when you're in a text figure.

I think Curio is going to completely replace Devonthink for planning writing projects. It's a little easier to navigate tags in DT, but Curio appears to have a workaround for DT's "reveal tag" function. You can create saved searches, sort of like DT's smart groups, based on tags.

References are going to be useful. Imagine notes for a work of fiction. Write an idea space (like a page in a One Note file) for each character. Then write an idea space for each scene/chapter/act/whatever and create reference links to the character.

Now, you can look at the character and get a clickable list of what referred to that character.

Here's another thought.

You can use an idea space as a corkboard, dropping text figures like index cards. Or, you can drop as many pinboards as you want on an idea space and put your text figures on them. The individual text figures can be resized and moved. The pinboards move as one resizable object. You can move grouped text figures without the pinboard foundation, but you can't resize a group.

Please correct me if I've got any of this wrong. If I'd known what Curio did, I would have already been a user.

One Note has always seemed to be Microsoft's most useful tool, but as Office mutates, One Note seems to suffer. My One Note files sometimes need to be rebuilt, and it's just not what I want to use. Aside from a few familiarity things, like finding the Markdown button, Curio is working great for me.

Drewster wrote:

I’d love to see a video. I’m desperate for resources about
how others use Curio.

Zengobi has a YouTube channel, but there are only a handful of videos. Videos can take quite a bit of production time, a hard decision for a development shop of one (the case for Zengobi and Eastgate).

Nothing beats using the software, playing around, figuring out what the different buttons, inspectors, and widgets do, and asking questions in the developers' forums. Everything I know about Tinderbox, DEVONthink, Curio, etc., I gained by trial and error, and discussions in the forum and with the developers.

(FWIW, I understand Eastgate might be producing some videos soon where Mark Bernstein covers some of the basics of Tinderbox.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ox8eF3IaNI

Screencastsonline has a couple of good ones. IIRC you can sign up for a trial and watch them without committing to a sub

Drewster wrote:

I’d love to see a video. I’m desperate for resources about
how others use Curio.

I love Curio, but have found that for project planning on a broad canvas, as it were, Numbers is actually just as useful.

But Curio manages large quantities of data much more efficiently; I just don’t use it for that particular purpose (FoxTrot Pro is my favourite there).

Cheers!
Bill

You are spot on. Tools don't do the work, anyway, the craftsman does.

Numbers is not unlike Curio, actually. For a corkboard, just delete any tables and use text boxes. For my use, the model of a blank canvas for tables, graphs, text boxes, etc., is superior to the Excel way of a single spreadsheet per tab.

For other uses, the opposite is likely true, of course.

We lose sight of how easy we've got it, anyway. According to one theory sadly lacking in rationality, Shakespeare's smudged handwriting was never correctly interpreted.

He actually wrote, according to my carefully researched delusions, "Restore! Restore! My kingdom for a restore!"

Sadly, no 16th century Walmart sold backup drives. Even if they had been available, Shakespeare's inkwell didn't have a free USB port.

All's well, though. What actually started as hate mail to Microsoft ended up as Richard III. Frustrating for the bard, a boon for literature.

Oh, Microsoft, what blight through yonder Windows breaks?

MadaboutDana wrote:

I love Curio, but have found that for project planning on a broad
canvas, as it were, Numbers is actually just as useful.

But Curio manages large quantities of data much more efficiently; I just
don’t use it for that particular purpose (FoxTrot Pro is my
favourite there).

Cheers!
Bill

Mark Bernstein's Tinderbox video

https://vimeo.com/376012835

Drewster wrote:

I’d love to see a video. I’m desperate for resources about
how others use Curio.

Tools don't do the work for you, but if you've spent your days truing planks with chisels, a jack plane can change your life.

Curio's features have suggested a new-to-me outlining technique. I accept that it is likely old hat to everyone else.

I find it helpful to create this kind of outline as a new section (or subsection) in Curio. That focuses Curio's Organizer on just the outline I'm working on.

Consider the Organizer (a thing like Scrivener's Binder) and the idea space (the document) to be the panes of a two-pane outliner. Consider the entry at each level not to be a stepwise increment in the story events, but rather a state-of-the-story snapshot for a particular act, chapter, or scene.

So far, I'm using pinboard objects in the idea space. Text figures, each containing one short sentence or two, describe some little aspect. The pinboards categorize the notes. Things that happen, stuff a character wants, weather patterns in Baltimore, whatever captures elements of that region of the story. If you built a diorama for that point in the story, what would you see?

The completed outline amounts to a stack of corkboards, like a stack of CAT scan slices of the story. You could do the same thing with a series of Scapple files, or tabs in a Numbers file using the sheets as corkboards.

This appears to preserve flexibility when writing the first draft without the danger of running off the rails.

I have a notion it's impossible to write without outlining in some form. Some writers create that outline in the form of 50,000 words of long form prose requiring lots of fixups. Others write 3,000 words in a Harvard format outline and have a second draft complete in about the time the first writer completes his "outline."

But the problem, for me, of a Harvard outline is that my stories devolve into "this happened, this happened, then this other thing happened before the survivors lived happily ever after."

I'm cautiously optimistic this stack of dioramas will work.

The same thing could be done with OmniOutliner, Word, org-mode, or pencil and paper, and it could look like a Harvard outline from a distance. In that physical outline format, I have to avoid stepwise pedantry in the outline.

Curio and pinboards may help encourage me away from telling details in the outline.

Imagine a Curio Organizer entry, "The day I'll die." One pinboard on that idea space is for what characters did, and might contain "Drove my Chevy to the levee." The pinboard for the good ol' boys would say "Drinking whiskey and rye." The weather conditions pinboard might include an observation the drought was unbroken, and the levee was dry.

Now, when if I were to write such genius, I'd have the freedom to embellish the story as I wrote it.

Or, as the preacher in Blazing Saddles so colorfully said, maybe I'm wasting my time. But, hey, at least I'm on the pilgrim's path, searching for hope with both hands and a flashlight. I might turn up something.

A useful feature of Curio that might work into the method you are experimenting is that you can drag an "idea space" (i.e., a canvas) into another idea space and you will get a live view of the dragged-in idea space. So you can change something on one idea space and see that change reflected on the idea space to which you dragged the first idea space.

Sort of like transclusion but not really.

How does that work, Paul? When I drag one Organizer entry onto another, it moves it as a child of the idea space I dragged it on.

That sounds like an interesting feature.

Carl

Paul Korm wrote:

A useful feature of Curio that might work into the method you are
experimenting is that you can drag an "idea space" (i.e., a canvas) into
another idea space and you will get a live view of the dragged-in idea
space. So you can change something on one idea space and see that
change reflected on the idea space to which you dragged the first idea
space.

Sort of like transclusion but not really.

https://d.pr/v/LDpINm


Amontillado wrote:

How does that work, Paul? When I drag one Organizer entry onto another,

Thanks, Paul - I was trying to drag within the Organizer.

I appreciate your help!

Paul Korm wrote:

https://d.pr/v/LDpINm


Amontillado wrote:
>How does that work, Paul? When I drag one Organizer entry onto another,