Going along with my ideas over the past few days, particularly that of focusing primarily on making Beyond a web application (though of course the desktop clients will follow, in their own due time), I’m starting to see Beyond in a newer light. I mentioned a little bit about this in my last post: people are inevitably going to want to do more than just edit their genealogy — they want to publish it. Not everything, of course, but they want to make charts that they can print out, and nowadays they want to publish to the web. I’m thinking something like genealogy translated into a blog metaphor, somehow. In fact, I still don’t know exactly how that’d work out, but I do really like the idea of making Beyond be more than just a record manager. This idea of publishing your family tree (or just part of it, even — you’d be able to specify what and how much) dynamically, with a live link, has taken hold of me. I’ve first got to look at the other apps out there — phpGedView, etc. — and see what’s around… And I’ll think about this some more, too.

Earlier this evening one of my Thai friends called and wanted some help putting together a genealogy website for her family. As I was considering what it would take, I realized that this probably fits very well into Beyond’s landscape (web-based, collaboration, etc.). And yet I don’t want that to be Beyond’s main focus — it’s going to be a record manager, and a darn good one at that. But I don’t think the two goals — managing records and publishing them — are mutually exclusive in any way.

As far as the Thai part goes, internationalization is a big thing. PAF, for example, isn’t translated into Thai, and when I try to enter Thai characters into a name field, it thinks they’re numbers. Everything will be Unicode, of course, and I’ll do my best to make sure things work out for languages with scripts radically different from ours, like Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic. More on this later. (Just out of curiosity, do pedigrees in Arabic flow from right to left? Hmm…)

Well, these thoughts aren’t as clear as I would’ve liked, but hopefully they’ll gel over the next day or two and I’ll figure out just what I’m trying to say. :) In the meantime, thanks to all those who’ve given input so far — it’s very helpful and I really appreciate it. Keep it coming. :)

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