Happy New Year!
I hope everyone had a pleasant holiday season,
and best wishes to all in the new
year.
I had a very nice holiday season, but didn't quite get as much done as I'd hoped. I did make some good progress. On New Years Day, I picked up a nasty cold. Because of that, I've been home sick and unable to go to work. On Tuesday, I was able to work on MacPAF most of the day from my bed, and accomplished a lot. The last two days, however, I've felt much worse and haven't been able to do much of anything :(.
The end is in sight for the first preview release. There are only a handful of things left to do before I'll feel comfortable letting some of you beat on it and put it through its paces. If all goes well, sometime this weekend or during next week I will release the first public preview.
Bear in mind, this first release will be beta quality. It has some blatant performance issues with large files I still have to nail down, and it's only been tested on my laptop and desktop on 10.4.3. I will be testing it this weekend on my old Beige G3 on 10.1.5.
Many features will not be entirely finished. TempleReady submission will not be finished in the preview release, but will be for the final 1.0 release. MacPAF will probably lose some custom GEDCOM fields when you edit files imported from other genealogy programs. Many windows applications like PAF and Legacy use these custom GEDCOM fields to store specific information to those programs that are not part of the GEDCOM specification. These data fields usually only have meaning to those specific programs, but if you import data from one of the programs, modify it in MacPAF and open it back up in the original application, some of that custom data may be missing. This is a touchy subject that all GEDCOM applications have to deal with, and no important data is ever supposed to be stored in these custom fields, or should be stored somewhere else as well, like notes. This is one are where feedback will come in handy. There are several ways to deal with the issue, and I haven't quite decided what to do yet. If you only use MacPAF to edit your files, this won't be an issue.
Multimedia support will not be finished for the preview release. There will be places to put photos of individuals in the interface, but they won't work. This will be working at some level in the final 1.0 release, but multimedia files always pose some complicated issues.
Sorting the individual and family lists probably won't be finished, and searching will be possible, but fairly basic. I anticipate both of those to be much better in the final release. The preview won't have much support for sources outside of the notes. Also, I haven't done any help documentation yet. Hopefully it's familiar enough to be usable to most people, and this an area where users of the preview release can help with the project by helping me write the help :).
Also, I've hand many kind requests from people to help with the icons and logos. I'm very appreciative of this (as I'm artistically challenged) and have been putting together a list of things that we'll need. So the preview release will have a mismash of poor icons and the application logo will be a temporary one. Hopefully with the help of these fine volunteers the final release will have a nice logo and better icons. I'll be contacting those who offered to help in the next few days to enlist their help.
There's more, but I'll leave the details for the actual release documentation.
With the preview release, you should be able to import GEDCOM files, and view and edit all of the basic information (birth, death, ordinances, notes, etc.) You'll be able to view some of the more advanced data, like personal attributes (hair color, occupation, etc), but it won't have support for editing/adding them yet (again, should be in final 1.0). I expect the application to have several bugs. It will probably hang or freeze up on occasion. It happens rarely now to me while I'm testing it, but when exposed to a larger set of machines, systems, and data, I expect for some bugs to be exposed. Your feedback and bug reports will be crucial here.
Thanks to everyone for your patience while I try to finish this up. I really wish I could spend more time and do more with this application, but my resources are very limited. MacPAF won't compare features-wise with any of the other Mac genealogy apps, but hopefully will be useful to a group of you. It has fulfilled its purpose for me, which was to be a learning experience. I have learned a tremendous amount working on this project.
Depending on how the preview release goes, I expect a final 1.0 release in 1 to 3 months.
I had a very nice holiday season, but didn't quite get as much done as I'd hoped. I did make some good progress. On New Years Day, I picked up a nasty cold. Because of that, I've been home sick and unable to go to work. On Tuesday, I was able to work on MacPAF most of the day from my bed, and accomplished a lot. The last two days, however, I've felt much worse and haven't been able to do much of anything :(.
The end is in sight for the first preview release. There are only a handful of things left to do before I'll feel comfortable letting some of you beat on it and put it through its paces. If all goes well, sometime this weekend or during next week I will release the first public preview.
Bear in mind, this first release will be beta quality. It has some blatant performance issues with large files I still have to nail down, and it's only been tested on my laptop and desktop on 10.4.3. I will be testing it this weekend on my old Beige G3 on 10.1.5.
Many features will not be entirely finished. TempleReady submission will not be finished in the preview release, but will be for the final 1.0 release. MacPAF will probably lose some custom GEDCOM fields when you edit files imported from other genealogy programs. Many windows applications like PAF and Legacy use these custom GEDCOM fields to store specific information to those programs that are not part of the GEDCOM specification. These data fields usually only have meaning to those specific programs, but if you import data from one of the programs, modify it in MacPAF and open it back up in the original application, some of that custom data may be missing. This is a touchy subject that all GEDCOM applications have to deal with, and no important data is ever supposed to be stored in these custom fields, or should be stored somewhere else as well, like notes. This is one are where feedback will come in handy. There are several ways to deal with the issue, and I haven't quite decided what to do yet. If you only use MacPAF to edit your files, this won't be an issue.
Multimedia support will not be finished for the preview release. There will be places to put photos of individuals in the interface, but they won't work. This will be working at some level in the final 1.0 release, but multimedia files always pose some complicated issues.
Sorting the individual and family lists probably won't be finished, and searching will be possible, but fairly basic. I anticipate both of those to be much better in the final release. The preview won't have much support for sources outside of the notes. Also, I haven't done any help documentation yet. Hopefully it's familiar enough to be usable to most people, and this an area where users of the preview release can help with the project by helping me write the help :).
Also, I've hand many kind requests from people to help with the icons and logos. I'm very appreciative of this (as I'm artistically challenged) and have been putting together a list of things that we'll need. So the preview release will have a mismash of poor icons and the application logo will be a temporary one. Hopefully with the help of these fine volunteers the final release will have a nice logo and better icons. I'll be contacting those who offered to help in the next few days to enlist their help.
There's more, but I'll leave the details for the actual release documentation.
With the preview release, you should be able to import GEDCOM files, and view and edit all of the basic information (birth, death, ordinances, notes, etc.) You'll be able to view some of the more advanced data, like personal attributes (hair color, occupation, etc), but it won't have support for editing/adding them yet (again, should be in final 1.0). I expect the application to have several bugs. It will probably hang or freeze up on occasion. It happens rarely now to me while I'm testing it, but when exposed to a larger set of machines, systems, and data, I expect for some bugs to be exposed. Your feedback and bug reports will be crucial here.
Thanks to everyone for your patience while I try to finish this up. I really wish I could spend more time and do more with this application, but my resources are very limited. MacPAF won't compare features-wise with any of the other Mac genealogy apps, but hopefully will be useful to a group of you. It has fulfilled its purpose for me, which was to be a learning experience. I have learned a tremendous amount working on this project.
Depending on how the preview release goes, I expect a final 1.0 release in 1 to 3 months.
Posted: Thu - January 5, 2006 at 12:41 AM
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Published On: Oct 10, 2006 12:12 AM
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Published On: Oct 10, 2006 12:12 AM