Local file editing
This morning I discovered Pixoh, an online photo editor. Quite cool. But what it made me think of was this: a similar kind of site but for genealogy. It’d be the Beyond web client but allow you to open a local file from your hard drive or flash drive (in Beyond format, PAF, GEDCOM, whatever), work on it, and then save it again to a local file. That way you wouldn’t have to have a hosting server to use Beyond online. You’d lose all the advantages of the genealogy-anywhere model, of course, and you’d have to store the file yourself, but it could be nice if you don’t want to get hosting. There’d have to be strict privacy, of course (no storing the files on the server after you close the window, or after 24 hours like Pixoh). Hmm… Any thoughts? Would this be useful? (All this would be in addition to what I’ve already mentioned for Beyond, by the way, not instead of it.)
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I really like this idea. I just wanted to suggest that you at some point componentize Beyond and prioritize the components, because the project scope is getting expansive (server, web client, desktop clients on multiple OS’s, etc.). Based on what I’ve read, it looks like you’ll have the most success with putting together a server/web client and considering expansion of this kernel later.
Good point. And yes, I’m going to focus on the server/web client first, because trying to accomplish all of this all at once would be immensely daunting and nigh well impossible. I do want to stay open to new ideas that may end up being useful (like this one), and if I’m at least aware of them from the beginning, I can make sure that early design decisions don’t render those kinds of things impossible (or even inconvenient).
As I’ve mentioned before, communication with the server will go through an API (which all of the clients will use, I think, including the web client), which means other people can start work on desktop clients if they want. The main thing at this point, now that the grand picture has come into focus, is to get a prototype up ASAP and start coding. I’m inclined to start with the interface first (per 37signals’ advice), and we’ll see where things go. But first one last final to conquer…