Things are rather busy over here, but I’ll soon have more time to start writing again. In the meantime, enjoy working on your genealogy. ;)

I meant to blog about this several days ago — it was announced this past Wednesday — but I had a paper due. ~sigh~ :)

Anyway, FamilySearch Labs has announced their smart pedigree viewer. In a nutshell, it’s a Flash-based pedigree chart. Here are my thoughts on it:

As for general impressions, I really, really like it. It’s smooth, intuitive, and fun. I’ve been waiting a long time to get a bird’s-eye view of my family tree, let me tell you, so this is like Christmas. :) You can zoom in and out (both through the control in the upper left and through the scroll wheel on your mouse) and pan around very nicely. If you hover over a family (being the box which holds a husband and wife), it highlights the line from that family down to you, and highlights all their ancestors as far as the lines go. It’s a nice way to see how the lines relate to each other. You can also print the pedigree out (and it seemed to work fairly well for me).

This isn’t quite as important, but I love the color scheme of the top banner. Very pretty. It makes me happy. :) The graphic design is excellent.

Possible changes:

1. It’d be nice to use vector-based images for the male/female icons instead of bitmaps, since they look quite pixelated when you zoom in close.

2. If you happen to be over a family and click the mouse button to pan, when you release the button it’ll expand the box for that family when you let go. It seems like it ought to discard the expand event if the user ends up panning. (It probably needs to use a small threshold of movement to cover those cases where they accidentally move the mouse a little bit while clicking, but it wouldn’t need to be that large, methinks.)

3. It’d be nice if you could switch the expanded data between a) birth/death for the husband and wife and b) a list of their children with birth years. (I imagine a clickable icon in the upper right letting you toggle.) In fact, it might not be a bad idea to have several “modes” for the expanded box — birth/death info, children, pictures, timeline (sparkline, methinks), visual representation of how much information you have on them, which temple work has been done, etc. But it also might be a bad idea. :)

All told, I’m very pleased with this new viewer and look forward to what else will come out of the FS Labs.