An End of Year Evaluation - Sun, 23 Dec 2012

I’m not happy. It is unfortunate, but I feel I’ve dropped the ball this year with Behold, and let both users and myself down.

It started off great, with Version 1.04 released in January after a flurry of activity that followed the 1.0 release just a couple of months earlier. For the next few months, I was merrily on my way with a number of small improvements and bug fixes and I was preparing to finish off Version 1.05 to get ready to add GEDCOM export and a Behold database file format that would be the next step before editing.

Then in April, I was taken in by the concept of Life Events. I realized that using this idea and creating a personalized timeline for every individual is the best way to display genealogical data so that it is most useful. It eliminates the improper family definition of family (parents and children) that most genealogy software implements. It also provides a framework upon which consistency checking can be added. That April post on Life Events even included a simple example that I had quickly programmed into Behold.

At the time, it didn’t seem like it would take too long to finish off Life Events. I continued to work on it over the summer, and it grew in complexity. But I couldn’t get it to completion.

On August 15th, I took to Reassessing the Behold Road Map and I put my plans in order.

On August 24th, I got sidetracked. I became involved in helping to get a Genealogy Q&A Site going. It’s not that this isn’t a valuable thing for the Genealogy community. Yes it is. It’s just that it deflected too much of my time. When I get involved in something, I get involved! And that’s bad when that something also has the attributes of being fun and addictive, and takes me too much away from Behold.

I didn’t have a lot of free time during the fall, and Behold’s Life Events included a fair bit of complicated code that needed to be worked out properly. It was all too easy to pass on this hard stuff and play around with the Genealogy Q&A site. Add to this some time taken for learning and playing with my Windows Phone, preparation and planning for my Genealogy Cruise in February, plus my regular routine complicated by a more than average set of out-of-the-ordinary happenings – all have been helping to take me off course.

So, as I said, I’m not happy with my progress. Behold should have Life Events and Consistency Checking in it by now. It doesn’t and there’s still work left to get it there.

Let’s see if I can get it rolling again. You’ll be able to tell by this blog. The more I work on Behold, the more I blog about it.