The ratings in this article are bit suspect… since they include their own product and that ends up being the top rated product. And the stars don’t seem right either. The ratings range from 4.5 stars (of 5) to 2.5 stars. Yet the reviews ranges from ‘nothing but good things to say’ to ‘little good to say beyond it being free’. So there really should be more of a spread in the ratings.
Gramps didn’t do well in their assessment. (2nd from bottom.) From all indications, they found the interface so difficult to navigate that they never found most of the features.
They even stated that “functions work strangely or incorrectly.” Most likely, they ran into context-sensitive features. (Such as: the import that is absent from the menus without a tree loaded, Charts that show nothing without a Person set to be the Active Person, Geography views that are confusing until there are Events with Places with coordinates, or the initial confusion building a family around people) From the screen capture, you can tell they were sucessful importing the British royalty. And they closed gramplets trying to recover the sidebar & bottombar … but couldn’t discover how to close those splitbars.
I agree with the simple tree idea but I totally disagree with adding Families being the main entry. In fact I do not have Families in my SideBar at all (and could probably do away with it as a dropdown from the Menubar but cannot be hassled. Genealogy is all about People (Individuals, Persons if you will) that is why I maintain the Scottish tradition of the female always maintaining the maiden name even until death who will come together at some point maybe for life maybe not. to produce children and so on.
This is a Graphical age so the entry is the Pedigree View (GRAMPS should open by default on the Pedigree View on 1st install with the prebuilt tree ready to be modified) or even better GraphView for easy understanding, adding individuals and joining nodes.
This is the same route as all major Family History sites.
This generation do not want keyboard entry (or as little as possible) Keyboard shortcuts are for the birds or software programmers drag and drop left and right click or tap is where the next generation is going.
Very bizarre. They are comparing a full blown genealogical db system to a photo management application that happens to offer the ability to build a family tree from your photo collection.
Agreed. That’s why I added the caveats at the beginning. However, the creation of a basic pedigree diagram is a common task … and frustration.
While I do not think that the What’s Next? is an ultimate solution, it would help newbies to break through the 1st FOUR barriers. And after that, (other than the Geography view appearing to not work when there’s no GPS data or Internet connection) all the features have some feedback.
But it needs some cleanup for the features after the barriers are overcome.
