I wasn’t able to make it to the LDS tech talk session a few weeks ago, but Dan Hanks recently blogged about it, and I really wish I’d gone.

The church is also now in the design stages of a new open-source personal record manager that will interface with the new system and will perhaps take the role that PAF plays now.

Very good. It looks like they’ll be writing it in Java (or something similar), which is really quite a pity, but at least it’ll be something. (If only they’d realize how much better Ruby and Python and Perl are. ~sigh~) It’ll be a while before anything comes of this, though — several months at the very least. But since it’ll be open-source, with any luck they’ll keep it open from the beginning so that people can use it as it develops, rather than having to wait until a release.

Anyway, people keep asking me how my “PAF for Mac” (as this project originally started) is coming along, and it’s always disappointing to have to tell them it’s in suspended animation. But hopefully not for long! (And yes, I realize I keep saying that, but someday it’s really going to change. :))

Technorati Tags: LDS, PAF, genealogy, family history

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.

On the LDSOSS mailing list, Gordon Clarke (from the Family History Department) just e-mailed this out. It’s what they can say publicly about the new FamilySearch:

Brief Overview of New FamilySearch Features

1. Temple Ordinances
Family Search is simplifying the process required for Latter-day Saints to prepare names for the temple ordinances.

Imaging being able to manage your personal family history online, seeing at a glance what temple work needs to be done for your ancestors, and easily preparing a name for temple ordinances — all in one place on the Internet!

- Prepare temple names from home over the Internet (no more diskettes)
- Easily see ordinance information and status of work in progress
- Significantly reduce duplication of research and ordinance work

2. Online collaborative Family Tree
The family tree feature will allow people worldwide to create and manage their family histories online.

People from various cultures worldwide will be able to:

- Add, correct, and manage their family histories online
- Correct personal submissions/data in real time
- Dispute the submissions of others
- Work collaboratively with family members and relatives
- Find living relatives they did not know existed
- Reduce duplication of research effort and time

Interesting…

Technorati Tags: FamilySearch, LDS, Family Tree, genealogy, family history

Renee Zamora has written another post about the Family Tree beta. The part that sounds really good to me is “The church is developing a web services interface to this and are going to be open sourcing this project. They will be soliciting the world to write their own interfaces to this thing.” Excellent.

Technorati Tags: Family Tree, genealogy, LDS

Renee Zamora has written an article, FamilySearch’s New Feature Family Tree, about the Church’s replacement for TempleReady. (It does much more than that, of course.) It’s good to know about this because some features in Beyond will be pointless in the context of the new system (LDS-specific features, that is).

I’ve been thinking about online systems (like Family Tree, phpGedView, etc.) and wondering if there’s any point to writing desktop-based apps for genealogy anymore. The benefits of online are obvious for sharing and being able to access your information from any computer. As far as disadvantages go, the only real clincher I can think of is that you won’t always have Internet access when researching (especially out in the field).

I’m still going ahead with Beyond, regardless. There’ll be some research-oriented features which I doubt I’ll see on any online genealogy apps anytime soon, and I personally prefer doing my genealogy on a desktop app (if you’re online and the connection goes out, you can’t work anymore, and you may have lost some data).

But I’m not going to let my stubbornness get in the way of progress. :) I’ll be paying attention to where things are going in the genealogy/technology world and see how Beyond can best fit the needs that exist now and the needs that will exist in this new world.

Technorati Tags: Family Tree, FamilySearch, genealogy, phpGedView, LDS