Done and Onward - Sun, 26 Mar 2017

What a few months! Finished up RootsTech and left with 3rd place in the Innovator Showdown. Took a much needed one-week vacation with my wife. Finally got out of my boot and started driving again. And I finished DMT’s new website at www.doublematchtriangulator.com and last week released version 1.5 of DMT. With that version, DMT is no longer free – a lifetime license now costs $40 US. There’s just too much work and subsidiary costs involved in supporting a product for others to be able keep it as freeware.

Version 1.5 of DMT included a couple of fixes if you use the By Chromosome option. In that run’s People file, the numbers in column AH and after were not correct as they included the a-b match which they shouldn’t have. Also, not  matching to anyone will no longer crash the program.

In the meantime, I’ve arranged to do a number of talks.

1. I’ll be giving a demo of Double Match Triangulator to the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) Virtual Chapter on April 1, only open to APG members.
   
2. I’ll be attending IAJGS 2017 in Orlando in July and giving a Workshop on using DMT. 
   
3. I’ll be attending the Great Canadian Genealogy Summit in Halifax in October and giving 3 talks on DNA testing and using the results.

Onward with Behold

Now that DMT’s good for a bit, it’s time to shift back to Behold, whose Version 1.3 has been patiently sitting waiting for me to get back to it and finish it off. I’m excited about getting this version done and releasing it. It will have the last set of changes to the Everything Report that I feel are needed prior to starting to work on changing Behold from being just a GEDCOM reader into the fully capable genealogy editor that I want and need it to be.

The thrust of this last set of changes is adding some important DNA information that I know I’ll be using. I’m sure any of you who have already got into DNA testing or are planning to, will want these features as well. Relationships, chance of matching, expected amount of match, as well as DNA candidates will be available. I’ll write up a full blog post on them as I approach completion.

Then more for DMT

Flipping back to DMT, I know I want to remove the dependency that DMT has with the Excel libraries that are available only if you have Microsoft Office on your computer. I found a package called TMS FlexCel which I’ll purchase which will allow the creation of Excel files without having Excel.

The other thing this package will allow me to try, is to see if I can convert DMT to be compilable not only for Windows, but also for Mac. I currently use the VCL (Visual Component Library) which is the framework for developing Windows applications. With TMS FlexCel, I can try to convert from VCL to the FMX (FireMonkey) framework which would allow me to produce versions of DMT that would run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.  I may also want to see if I can make DMT a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app and add it to the Windows Store. And then, if I could figure a way to display a huge spreadsheet nicely on a phone, and figure out why I might want to do it, FMX would allow me to make a version of DMT for your Android or iOS phone.

Then there’s a few important improvements needed to DMT. It needs to be able to read in 23andMe match files directly, as well as read in GEDmatch matches directly. Then you’ll no longer have to convert those formats to FamilyTreeDNA format by hand, which will make sure the conversion is done correctly and save you time.

And Back to Behold

I’ll have to design the Behold database, build in GEDCOM export, and add editing.

I was at one time considering SQLite as the database that I’d use, but since then I’ve been convincing myself that the proper solution is a NoSQL database. SQL databases are relational, and have a fixed predefined structure. This is limiting in genealogical software and requires a rebuild whenever a field is added or changed. NoSQL databases are unstructured and extendable. The allow flexibility and can handle very large data sets (Google, Twitter, Ancestry and FamilySearch all use NoSQL) and if you need more web processing power, you just add another server. Using a NoSQL structure will allow me to keep data from other sources in their near-native form rather than force-converting them into something else.

I will have time to decide on the final database structure, SQL or not, before I start this work.

And Back to DMT Again and Behold some more

Double Match Triangulator doesn’t do everything I want it to do yet. It’s got to take that final leap and be able to do that mapping of your ancestral segments to your DNA for you. Currently DMT only lays out your matches for you to analyze. But if I can attain that next step, then DMT will become something amazing.

And Behold, once editing is added, needs to interface with the online systems, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Ancestry (if they’ll let me) and whoever else is an important system that I’ll want to obtain genealogy information from or sync with.

DNA interfaces would be nice as well. Why not load your DNA matches into your genealogy program? It’s just a matter of figuring out what ties between your genealogy research and your DNA test results are important and useful. Debbie Parker Wayne recently wrote: Wanted: Genetic Genealogy Analysis Tools Incorporating Family Tree Charts. Debbie gives some good ideas. I commented on her post and there’s some other good comments there as well.

Lot’s to do. Back to work.