I’ve finally finished Translating Scripture and sent it off to press, so I can begin work on Beyond in earnest. :) I’ve got some homework to catch up on right now, though, so it’ll have to wait till tomorrow. :)

One of the things I’ll be keeping in mind throughout Beyond’s development is support for other languages, including languages with other scripts like Thai, Arabic, Chinese, etc. Unicode makes that relatively easy, of course, but there will be some issues to work out with searching and things like that. I also need to research genealogy in other parts of the world, to make sure other ways of thinking about genealogy (like clans, for example) can easily be supported.

Technorati Tags: internationalization, localization, Unicode

I’m getting very close to sending Translating Scripture to press, which means that I’ll be able to devote a lot more effort to Beyond in the very near future.

But in the meantime, since I feel almost guilty writing such a short blog entry, I must flesh it out a little bit. Some of the goals I want Beyond to achieve are: 1) be very usable, to the point that it gets out of the way of the user and lets them do what they want to do, 2) make good, solid research easy to do and keep track of, 3) be compatible with as many other products out there, and 4) be useful (I don’t want to add features just so I can say I have ten gazillion features). And 5) be beautiful. There are plenty more and I’ll be sorting and prioritizing them into a nice, pretty design document later, but since this blog is my design sketchbook of sorts, I’ll most likely be brainstorming about them here as well.

My CD of PAF 2.3.1 (Family Records) arrived in the mail today. It’s an old program. I don’t intend to emulate it, mind you — it’s just for compatibility so that Beyond will be able to read PAF 2.3.1 files (along with 4.x and 5.x files). OS X looks so much better than Classic (OS 9 and before) did. It’s an incredible difference.

Technorati Tags: PAF, genealogy, Mac

Started reading through Working with Quartz Composer (ADC) today. I didn’t really know what it was till now (and even now I’m still not entirely sure I understand it :)) but it looks like it’ll be promising for Beyond’s UI. In fact, it seems to be a really cool way of doing the visual effects I’m planning (panning/scrolling/zooming), much better than coding it procedurally.

FYI, Beyond will be a Universal Binary from the get-go. More on that later.

Technorati Tags: Mac, programming, Quartz, Universal Binary

After writing that last post, I decided that it’d be good to use this blog as more of a sketchpad of sorts, writing about my ideas and design decisions and all that. Up until now, I’d intended only to write news releases and the exterior of the design process, but now I think that opening the hood would be best. Not only will it result in better design, but someone someday may find it an interesting case study in software design and usability. And it’s a nice record of why I did things the way I did.

Technorati Tags: software design

Just so you know, I’m finishing up the page layouts for this Translating Scripture book and hope to finish them by early next week, and when I do that I’ll quickly do the Plan of Salvation cards as well, and then I will devote my full effort (outside of school and work and all that) to Beyond. It’s waited long enough.

One design question I’m thinking through is the pedigree chart. Part of me likes the idea of it being zoomable/pannable, like a page in Illustrator or Photoshop. But the smaller it got, the smaller the text would get as well. This may not be an issue if you can move the mouse over the person and have a crisp tooltip pop up with the information you need… One cool part of having zoom is that if you searched for someone else, it could zoom out, pan over to the new person, and zoom back in again, ala Google Earth. (This is pure eye candy, of course. I’ll only include it if it doesn’t get in the way of usability.)

The alternative is have a fixed set of generations on the screen (the person, their parents, their grandparents, and their great grandparents), and that’s what PAF does. I’ll have to think through it some more — I want Beyond to be fluid, to lend itself to experimenting and exploration, and to feel as natural as software can feel.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, Mac

Started working on the UI sketches. Here’s what I’ve come up with for the pedigree so far:

I’m not satisfied with it (should people show up where they belong on the timeline or in a more rigid format for generational consistency?) but it’s a start. You can expect something that looks really nice, like this but even better. I’ll be posting more later.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, pedigree, Mac, UI

It’s almost a year old, but still quite applicable:
The Sad State of Mac Genealogy Software.

Renee Zamora has written another post about the Family Tree beta. The part that sounds really good to me is “The church is developing a web services interface to this and are going to be open sourcing this project. They will be soliciting the world to write their own interfaces to this thing.” Excellent.

Technorati Tags: Family Tree, genealogy, LDS