Nathan Alderman

Curio Core 7. Source: iTunesEven the most organized souls can still find themselves drowning in a sea of clippings and notebooks in search of one elusive idea. Curio Core 7 (Mac App Store link) consolidates your thoughts into one useful digital space. Despite its arsenal of options, it mostly balances those powerful abilities with admirable ease of use.

Each of Curio Core's Project files houses a series of Idea Spaces for your work. Like many of its other elements, Curio lets you choose from a variety of preset Idea Space styles, from slick PowerPoint-style background gradients to replicas of notebook and graph paper. You can then tweak and save those styles as your own custom options.

Artwork: Chip TaylorWith Firefox 5 , Mozilla shifts to a faster release schedule, emulating the lightning pace at which Google's Chrome gains version numbers. Version 5 debuts mere months after Firefox 4, and Mozilla promises that future editions will arrive with similar speed.

But based on Firefox 5's paltry slate of notable new features, I'd say this swift increase in version numbers is mostly marketing. Firefox 4 represented a huge leap forward for the browser. Firefox 5? More like a small step or two.

Mozilla Firefox's flashy features often bogged down its performance--until now. Though it's still not quite as fast overall as rivals Safari 5 ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) and Chrome, the leaner, meaner Firefox 4 makes a quantum leap forward from its predecessor. (Image Caption: Results in seconds. Shorter bars are better.)

Fiery and foxy

For years, Firefox has trundled along at the back of the browser pack, a beast of burden laden with fancy features but lacking speed. Not anymore. Mozilla has released Firefox 4, and in our preliminary tests, the browser makes a huge performance leap forward.

On a 2GHz Core 2 Duo aluminum MacBook with 2GB of RAM, Firefox 4 roughly quadrupled Firefox 3.6.15's speed in an XHTML rendering test and the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. Its Acid3 score improved by 3 points (reaching 97 out of 100), and it gained more than 100 points out of 400 on its predecessor in an HTML5 compliance test (255 and 9 bonus points vs. 155 and 4 bonus points).

Since Scrivener debuted in 2007, I've used it to write two (terrible) novels and a (terrible) screenplay, among other projects. It's a favorite among Macworld staffers, too, earning a 2010 Editors' Choice Award. Its many refinements to the already great original make Scrivener 2.0.2 worth every penny.

Like its predecessor, Scrivener 2 offers an extensive suite of writing aids without ever forcing users to confirm to any set process. Whether you want to jump in and start typing, or prefer to compile meticulous research and outline the whole narrative, Scrivener's happy to hand you the tools and get out of your way.

Version 11 of Opera Software's proudly independent browser has a few of the gently oddball developments that made its predecessors stand out from the pack. But it's also added a few more conventional features that help close the performance gap with its rivals.

JavaScript performance: From falsetto to baritone

In the months since we reviewed version 5 of Google's Chrome Web browser ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), the developers in Mountain View have not been slacking off. The latest stable release of this contender for the Mac browser crown now stands at version 8 and counting. While it doesn't pack many major improvements, the new features it does sport are welcome and well implemented. More importantly, its increased speed and standards compliance help Chrome 8 largely leave the latest version of Safari eating its dust.

All hail the new king

If Apple's Mail ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) is the affordable hatchback of e-mail clients, Postbox 2 is the category's luxury sedan. Handsomely appointed with why-didn't-anyone-think-of-this-sooner features, Postbox seems to anticipate and serve your every e-mail need. The handful of bumps I encountered while taking Postbox 2 for a spin were more than balanced by how much fun it was to use.

The first time you launch Postbox 2, you're automatically invited to import settings from an existing e-mail program, or set up an account by entering your e-mail address and password. Postbox supports POP and IMAP accounts, but can't work natively with Exchange servers.

Printing from the Web can be perilous. Each browser interprets pages differently, and what emerges from your printer can sometimes look nothing like what you saw on the screen.

To find the best browser for printing from the Web, I tested Safari 5.0.3, Firefox 3.6.13, and Chrome 8 on a selection of pages with unconventional or complex designs. To save ink and paper, I "printed" each page to a PDF file first. The results? None reproduced every page flawlessly, but one got significantly closer than the others.

Like nearly all aspects of Outlook 2011, the Office suite's mail program that replaces Entourage, Microsoft's coders seem to have thought of everything when it comes to printing. Each of the program's five categories comes with its own set of printing options. Here's a quick rundown.

Mail

Microsoft's Outlook 2011 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) isn't just the same old Entourage 2008 e-mail program repackaged with a sleek new surface. From consolidated inboxes to Quick Look support, there are just as many improvements under the hood as there are on the surface. But despite the redesign, Microsoft made sure to retain many of the bonuses and shortcuts that made Entourage a power user tool. Here are some favorites you might have missed:

1. Keyboard shortcut savvy

Last month's vacation photos can too easily become this month's blur of forgotten details. MemoryMiner 2.1.1 turns photo albums into narratives, tagging people and locations to preserve the stories of your life. While its interface needs refinement, the program largely fulfills its big ambitions.

MemoryMiner lets you easily drag and drop photos into its main album window, either from the Finder, iPhoto, or its built-in Media pane. In my tests on a 2GHz aluminum MacBook with 2GB RAM, the program handled large libraries reasonably well. It took me about one second to navigate from one image to the next in a 500-picture library, and about two seconds in a 5,000-picture library.