Over the next week I’ll be trying out the various Mac genealogy apps and seeing what’s good and what’s not. So I downloaded GEDitCOM and just tried it out. Um, can we say unintuitive? First of all, when you start it for the first time, it doesn’t actually open a window. So you have to go up to the menu bar and create a new file. Bad. Second, when I do create a new file, up comes a grid and it’s not really clear what to do next. There is a textbox saying “Typed Name:”, so I tried typing a name in there and hitting Return. Nothing happened. So I went down to the grid/table (which has labels like Name, Birth, Death, Father, and Mother) and tried typing in a name, to add a person. Nothing. Double-clicked. Nothing. Finally I had to go up to the menu and find the New Individual command, which is under Tree. Not intuitive. And the “New Individual” dialog is…ugly. The toolbar’s not helpful because it’s not clear from the icons what they do, and they’re not labeled.

Anyway, enough of that. I’ve got to get to bed and so I haven’t been able to do more with it, because I’m sure it has strengths that I just haven’t found yet. At any rate, seeing the level of user unfriendliness has renewed my determination to write Beyond as soon as I can and show the world how easy genealogy can be (at least when it comes to the software :)).

Technorati Tags: GEDitCOM, genealogy, Mac, usability, UI

Posted in Design
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