This coming week I’ll be doing more research for the program, in the following general areas:

1. Usability. The goal is to make Beyond as user-friendly as possible. So, what goes into making an application user-friendly? How can I ensure that users’ needs are met? Part will be familiarity, which will come from borrowing familiar models (like the web browser model), at least in theory. We’ll have to wait for the first beta release to see if that’s actually true or not. :) Keystrokes have to be well-chosen (and completely user-configurable, of course). Things have to feel right. I’ll also be doing usability tests to see what things people have trouble with and where we can make it easier.

2. Database format. I’m almost 100% certain that the native file format will be in XML, but internally I need something faster, especially when the files contain over 10,000 names. Core Data looks nice but I don’t have Tiger, so we’ll see if we can do without for now.

3. Open file formats. The goal is for Beyond to be 100% compatible with PAF (not only 5.2 — the latest version — but also the earlier versions, so that you’ll be able to open any old PAF file and save it into whichever format you want) and GEDCOM and whatever else I can get specs for. And instead of having to import it into Beyond’s native format (which of course you’ll be able to do), you’ll be able to open a PAF file and work with it and save it just as if you were running PAF itself. The idea is for it to work kind of like Photoshop — you can open a JPEG and hit save and it’ll save a JPEG, not a PSD file. And of course you’ll be able to have multiple documents open.

Anyway, I have pages and pages of design ideas that just keep coming. This week I’ll hopefully get a good grip on the internal database format so I can design the file structure and write the core of the viewer module. I’ll also put together the website and write some general design docs and a release milestone chart and stuff like that.

Posted in Design
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