Saturday, February 15, 2003 - Sat, 15 Feb 2003

Removed Family Origins from my “Top 4″ genealogy programs in my Genealogy Program Links page. That program will no longer be supported by Ancestry after June 30, 2003. The original author of Family Origins has created a new program called RootsMagic that seems to be very good. I downloaded the trial version of the program and it is very polished and seems to me like the culmination of the last 15 years progress in genealogy programs. It is also the most extreme, compartmentalized, wizard-supported program ever developed for genealogy; fixed form, many templates - and the exact opposite of what Behold will be. But being what it is, I’ve put RootsMagic into my top 4 replacing Family Origins as the best of the simple to use but full featured programs.

I found what was causing the pathname/filename bug. I initially set up a dummy GEDCOM line in my GEDCOM list so that I have an example I can see when I’m in design mode. At program startup I have to clear this dummy value out. Easy to fix, but I’m sure I had coded that before. Don’t know why this bug crept up now. Strange.

While I’m at it, I’ll change the caption of the program to show the input file(s), whether it be a Behold file, or one or more GEDCOM files. That is the Windows standard and the way it should be. Previously, I had set it up to show the main Family names in the files - and that has bothered me for a long while since I did it. Now its finally fixed.

Also I now notice that removing a GEDCOM does not remove it from the Input File Listings. Again very strange. I know I had fixed this one before. In fact, I list that work in this Blog on Jan 20 and Jan 23. As it turns out, it looks like I didn’t do this quite correctly on the 23rd. I had an extra “+1″ in the code, so the last Input File was not being removed. Now fixed.

Then, when the mouse is clicked, some characters are selected (highlighted in blue) that were not selected by the mouse but are nearby to the mouse selection. This one seems a bit tricky. It’s not obvious what it is.