Tuesday, August 9, 2005 - Tue, 9 Aug 2005

I stumbled across the Beta development page of GenoPro Version 2.0 at: www.genopro.com/beta/. I’m very impressed with the detail that the author, Daniel Morin, has put into the Beta. He’s been working on the Beta for over 2 years now and still has a bit to go. Some of his ideas are very innovative, e.g.: Report Generator, Spreadsheet output, XML output, making Places an object, Unicode, and (the one I like the best) allowing entry of Pets. Of course, his GenoMaps is the main innovation upon which the program is based. Reading through his material is quite worthwhile.

What is ironic is that despite my really relating to Daniel’s programming style and openness, GenoPro appears to be the antithesis of Behold. It is based first on its GenoMap, whereas I base Behold first on the Everything Report, and I deem charts to be much less important. GenoPro is entirely modal box based with fields for every type of data. Behold avoids those in-your-face-have-to-deal-with-first boxes at all costs.

Interesting thought: Behold Version 2.0 would have no problem entering pets if you wish. Add a custom field for “animal type” and “breed”. Link it to its father and mother and siblings, mates and children, so you can document your pet’s genealogy. Link it to a second set of “parents” and give that relationship as “owned by” and you’ll be able to see all the pets that a family had, as well as all families that a pet had. Add other events for whatever was significant in the pet’s life and it will be an interesting story.