Welcome to my discussion forum for Behold - Categorized in: General Discussion

I don't expect to see much conversation here until Behold is released, but feel free to try the forum and begin discussion.

Thanks for taking an interest in Behold.

Louis

Thanks Chief,

May I ask what sort of "unwanted" names you have that you need to sort out. Are they relationship based (i.e. relatives of a specific person), surname based, or something else? For what purpose are you sorting them out?

I have mixed feelings about preferences. A lot of people want everything automatic, which is the most simplistic and easiest to use. Whereas other people want total control over everything, but giving preferences everywhere adds a huge amount of complexity and confusion. I think some happy medium might be best.

For instance, some programs give you 50,000 different ways of entering and displaying dates. The GEDCOM standard (and one that doesn't allow for ambiguity) is: 21 MAR 2003. What is better here? One standard or infinite choices. Wouldn't the programmer be better off adding features that help you with your genealogy rather than adding a zillion confusing options that in the end don't really add anything?

So I'm still not sure which way I'll go, but the first version will not have many reporting options. I may add options as the need arises or as users request them, but only if they are things that will provide some needed function.

Louis

I disagree entirely with the concept of merging other people's data into yours through import. I also very much dislike the idea of automated "matching and merging" process, which so many programs try to do and what many people think is "cool". But this is the way "junk" genealogies have been building up over time. Without any proof, people have been adding other people's errors to their own genealogies.

The problem is the unreliability of the other people's data, which is too often taken as fact. If the data is merged manually one-by-one, and each item is carefully thought about, properly sourced, and discrepancies are looked at, then maybe (just maybe) it would be acceptable.

Much better, in my mind, is to leave other people's data in their own GEDCOMs or databases. What you then need is a program (like Behold) that can read in more than one GEDCOM and organize (not merge) the data together so that you can easily reference the data from them all at once.

Sometime after the release of Version 1, and before adding editing in Version 2, I will be adding the capability to save GEDCOMs. This will allow you to organize and select the families you want from a GEDCOM and save only them into a new GEDCOM. That should allow you to prune the other trees you get.

With regards to identifying people in your index, I can see the difficulty with most programs in picking out which is the correct person. With Behold's name index, you click on the person, and the Everything Report would scroll to where that person is and you can see everything about them. Would that be good enough?

Labels for fields will be user defineable. And once editing is implemented, you will be able to add fields that are not in GEDCOM (but remember that very few programs will be able to read them in).

I don't understand the purpose of your example: to find and then edit married couples. Where do you get data just on all your married couples that will require that sort of editing? Behold is different. I am designing it to help you see your data better, and not hide it in single person forms. If you do want to filter your data, it should be to only get relatives of a certain person (so that you can send it to them), or all info pertaining to Chicago (since you might be going there), or all people with a certain surname (for one-name studies). Doing strange filters such as "all people born in Kentucky in the 1880's with one sister" does not seem useful to me. I would sooner use just a standard "Find dialog" and search through the Everything Report one-by-one and see the people in their full context as I pick them out.

I'm sorry if I might sound a little argumentative. I don't mean to. And I do appreciate your thoughts and you really are expressing your frustrations with what cannot be done with the standard type of Genealogy software that is out there. I would be very interested in seeing your list and I'd be happy to comment on it.

Louis

Faith:

You seem to be asking about how to write a genealogy program. I will e-mail you privately on this.

Louis

Hi:

Version 1.x of Behold will be "read-only". It will read your GEDCOM files and produce the Everything Report for your use. It will not yet have the capability to edit and save your data.

Version 2.0 of Behold will introduce in-place editing, where you will be able to edit your genealogy data right in the Everything report and then save it back to a GEDCOM file. It will feel like a Word Processor, but will have very nice features for entering Genealogy data, without the restrictions and inconveniences of form-based genealogy programs. At this point, Behold will be a full-featured genealogy program (except maybe for diagramming capability) designed to help you input and use your genealogy data.

Louis

Effectively, this means I have finally completed all I wanted to do with the Organize Features of Behold. I have three outstanding little things to fixup (hopefully tonight or tomorrow) and then I will get to increment my progress on the Behold home page and mark Organize Features as complete.

Then I'll next work to finish off the Everything Report and Log File and try to wrap up the user interface.

p.s. You'll be one of the first to know, since I've not mentioned it elsewhere, but I have decided to go through a Beta Test phase, and will make the Beta Test available to anyone interested. That will happen when my progress reaches 100%.