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

Posted in Design
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