Well At Least Behold Is Now Win7 Compliant - Sat, 23 Apr 2011

One of the things I’ve been delaying is getting Behold the “Certified for Windows 7″ logo. Way back in 2007, I was turned off from getting the Vista certification when they required a Verisign certificate. Later, once I resigned myself to them not backing down on that, I found out they want a Version 1.0 and not a beta version.

But there was still something Behold was doing that wasn’t quite right for the new versions of Windows. It was placing its two sample files in the installation directory where the program was installed. That unto itself wasn’t wrong. But running the sample files meant that Behold would be creating a log file in that same directory. That was verboten.

I found that out as I was updating the Tutorial. When I first created the tutorial, it was way back when I was on my Windows XP machine. Now that I’m on Vista, I hit the roadblock. The log files are not created.

Yes there are ways to get around that. But the proper thing to do is to simply move the sample files to an area that the user puts his data into. There’s several possible places, but I like what a few other programs choose to do, and I put them in a “Behold/Sample Files” directory under the “(user)/Documents” directory. Doing so is allowed by Vista and Windows 7. It wasn’t too hard to modify Behold’s install program to make it so.

Now there’s nothing really holding back Windows 7 Logo Certification after Version 1.0 is released. It should be something I can get done while I’m working towards the 1.1 enhancements.

I’m actually surprised more genealogy programs don’t go after the logo. Microsoft’s endorsement means something. It is indicative of a product that is concerned about how well it works with Windows. If you go to the Microsoft Solution Finder, you can find all the companies that signed up as a Microsoft Partner. That’s really the first step towards endorsement. Do a search there for “genealogy” in any region, and you’ll only find 16 results. Other than Behold, there’s only one other recognizable genealogy programs on that list: Gaia Family Tree. The creators of Gaia, Lulu software (a Canadian company!) is a Microsoft Certified Partner, and Gaia has the “Compatible with Windows 7″ logo. So at least they’ve done their homework.

So what are the other 334 Windows genealogy programs out there doing? Eh?