Curio – Notebook application for note-taking and research

This is even for doing something at home like figuring the dimensions of a woodworking project, etc.

Either I'm a freak and the only person interested in this, or it's an idea that would revolutionize note-taking, or something in between.

I use OneNote and Obsidian, and I am unable to stick to one mostly because OneNote's free form structure is really helpful in brainstorming, creating notes and doing research. Most of my notebooks and pages are filled with research sub pages and a final page that distills all that. So for me from quick note taking to creating well filled noteboks, OneNote does most of it. But it lacks a way to inter connect the notes, yes [[]] exists but its not that good once you try connecting more things and OneNote's search is just very basic.

But Obsidian's interconnected and search feature is really well done to create polished notes. So I end up using that too for creating my final notes. Also markdown is just beautiful.

I see a bit of both is happening in Curio but I am not a fan of all the plugins and integrations it seems to be having (based on screenshots and demos). This is a no no for me, it just makes porting or even exporting notes elsewhere really difficult as the context is lost.

The whole idea of creating Notes and its app is the way you start using it based on the App's features and if that app is making me re structure the way I create notes then it should also have a way to work off context devoid of its features. I understand Curio is trying to be and one Notebook App to rule'em all but this makes it really difficult for me to switch mostly because it will change my behavior and not make it easy to leave the platform or app when I need to. There are so many rudimentary methods of consuming your notes like emailing, printing, sharing for review etc and with Curio without the visual charm those exported notes might not have the same feel or experience.

I am still new to digital note taking, I still do a lot of quick notes in my notebook whenever a notebook is around so I might not be seeing the big picture with digital note apps so my opinion here might have a lot of shortcomings as my experience with note taking is just very short.

My main issue with Curio across all versions has been that all the defaults for colors, fonts, layout, etc. are just hideous, garish, horribly outdated, in very poor taste.

You can add all kinds of elements such as shapes, graphs, lists, etc., and there are different preset styles for each element, but everything looks like something from Office 97. Every single color is wrong.

You can see this in the screenshots and the videos on the front page. There isn’t a single element on any of the screens that doesn’t have at least one thing wrong with it, like too dark drop shadows, too thick outlines, too thin fonts, arbitrary color choices that don’t match.

There’s a ton of thought and polish going into the UX, but as great as it is to use, it’s just way too easy to make something distractingly ugly, and almost impossible to make something even remotely elegant.

What are some other products that serve a similar niche? How do they differ from this?