Monday, September 11, 2006 - Mon, 11 Sep 2006

Well this was quite a day. I was working to make it possible from the Everything Report, to add the family of a selected person into the Everything Report. This would basically eliminate the need for the Name Index Window, and would simplify the use of Behold.

That led me to the realization that I can use the TreeView to add, delete and move the families. You won’t have to do that from the Organize Families page.

Then while implementing the selection function, I saw in one test file a couple who had a lot of children. This was shown as “Child: Name1 ID1 Name2 ID2 …” The IDs were the hyperlinks to the people. And then it hit me like a brick. Dennis, the programmer who’s been generously feeding me with ideas, had been hammering me with the question as to why those IDs are needed at all. Why not just put the links on the names? Show the children as “Child: Name1 Name2 …” and a simple click on the name takes you to them.

Doing this program-wide seems to result in further simplifications. The IDs in the Table of Contents are not needed. The entire left column of families in the Everything Report that contains the IDs would not be needed. The various Indexes get cleaned up. I’ll just have to add an option to add a sequential number onto the names for printing to enable you to find people quickly in the printed copy.

On top of this the Organize Pages will not need any numbering or IDs. This makes it possible to eliminate the Families page. The Numbering page now is left with just 2 dropdown boxes for ordering, and they can be made into program options. I have some ideas for alternatives to the GEDCOMs page. All that’s left is the Tags page.

The result of all this is there will be some radical surgery done between now and the next alpha version. A lot of the code that I spent months developing will be ruthlessly cut. The result will be a Behold that will still retain all its benefits and functionality, but will be much easier to use and will run considerably faster. I love the direction it’s taking!