I’ll be taking a short break from working on Beyond, because I’m designing a book for a friend. I don’t imagine it will take more than a few days, though — at least not the time-intensive part of it.

But concerning Beyond, part of me wants to try writing a smaller app first (iDiary, I’ve called it), to test the waters and get some experience coding in Objective-C with Cocoa. But part of me wants to jump right in with Beyond instead of “wasting time.” I’m still not sure which part will win. :) At any rate, from time to time I take a step back and say to myself, “What in the heck do you think you’re doing?!? You can’t really do this.” And then I look at a quote I put up on wall: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do” (Eleanor Roosevelt). And then it’s back to the battle, because I am going to do this, no matter how difficult it is or how many obstacles other are or how impossible it seems. You can call it my personal Everest if you like. :)

Sorry for not posting in a while. I’ll post again later today with more details, but rest assured that work has not halted. :) I’m still in the design stage, but this week I plan to finalize the first designs and start running them by people for usability testing. I’m also sending back the non-disclosure agreement today for the PAF specs, so I should get that back in the near future. I think I’ll work on the website, too, since that’s kind of essential. :) Since I’ve never coded for Mac before, I’m going to write a small journaling program first, to get a feel for things. At the moment I’m reading through the OS X developer guidelines and the human interface guidelines. Lots of good stuff there.

One decision I need to make soon is how to store the data internally. Speed is essential, as is scalability (since there are people out there with well over 10,000 names in their file). Hmm…

I’ve been reading Designing from Both Sides of the Screen, which is really good. I’m leaving for Mexico tomorrow morning and won’t have Internet access, but by the time I get back I expect to have first drafts of the task flow diagrams and hopefully much of the UI (but then again I don’t know how much time I’ll have to work on it while I’m there).

The PAF guys up at the Family History Department in Salt Lake are sending me the paperwork necessary to get the sample source code for working with the PAF database (file format). Hopefully it’ll include specs for the older versions; if not, I’ll lobby for them until I get them. :) Compatibility’s important. In the meantime, the first prototype will read Beyond’s native format and (since Beyond’s native format will be useless until I add the editing features) GEDCOM.

I checked out several books on usability from the library, including Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design for Programmers, which I read last night, and Designing from Both Sides of the Screen (Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski), which I’m reading right now. Good stuff. My primary goal for Beyond, which has now risen above all the others, is usability. The second, just as important, is simplicity. Now my task is to figure out how to take all these 10 pages of features I’ve come up with over the past two weeks and condense them into a simple and supremely usable interface that fits the needs of beginner and expert alike… :)

Finished the new banner today. I’m satisfied enough with it that I can start coding. :) (I’m the sort of person who has to have a beautiful banner under which to code, otherwise it just doesn’t go as well.)

I’m also corresponding with the Family History Department of the Church (the Church will mean The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by the way) about the PAF file format. One of my new goals for Beyond is as much compatibility with PAF (including older versions) and other genealogy programs as possible.

Oh, I guess I should say what Beyond is, huh. :) Beyond is currently in the design stages and will be a next-generation genealogy program for the Mac. Some of the goals I envision for it (and I’ll write these up on the website once I create the website :)) include compatibility with PAF and TempleReady, very user-friendly (and not just for beginning users but also for expert genealogy researchers), and solid with respect to sources and evidence. I realize this is hardly anything but I’ll get the planned specs up soon.

This blog is about the development of Beyond, a genealogy program for the Mac. More to come in the very near future…