Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - Wed, 28 Jun 2006

It was a small but enthusiastic crowd at my talk today to the Genealogy Forum of the Winnipeg PC User Group. Presenting a product like Behold to genealogists is a delicate matter because it is so very different from all other genealogy programs that they are used to using or have seen before.

The idea of being an output driven program that works with the final result (the Everything Report) is contrary to that of most Genealogy programs where modal forms-based input with limits on what can be output is the norm. I did the comparison to a Word Processing program. There you work on the final result in What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get mode. Everyone finds that very natural and extremely efficient. One line is wrong - just change it. Could you imagine having to exit the report and load up a form, find the form for the paragraph you want to change, look for the line, click a button to change the text, close that window, and check off all the options if you want to change the color or font or whatever, and then you have to regenerate your report again to see what it now looks like. Yikes! Word processing would become horribly inefficient - yet that is how most Genealogy programs are set up.

So it will be interesting to see how the world will take to Behold when version 1 is officially out, and again after version 2 with editing becomes available. Genealogists need something better. I’m hoping that through Behold, I’ll be able to give them that.