The Combined view experiment has clearly been a success. I was actually surprised by the amount of positive feedback. We will consider using it to replace the Relationship view in the next release.
Please keep it as a separate view. (With a more descriptive name than âCombinedâ. Maybe the other view could be the âVitalâ? As in⌠it just shows the Vital Statistics of the immediate family.)
The current Relationship view is a very spartan interface with far less distraction. It is an intuitive starter view and a good default. You can set Aunt Martha down with this view and she is likely to be able to immediately begin navigating it herself. (Although she will be likely to do some damage while exploring. Clicking the slightly-too-accessible-for-a-novice buttons and doing haphazard reâorder, share and delete operations to your tree.)
The original Relationship is the view that I use most often in Gramps.
(If you review the other thread, there are others with the same opinion. Some opinions will be be driven by a resistence to change.)
The Combined view is excellent and would make a great 2nd built-in. But its GUI is so packed that it is harder for people with ADD (and other conditions) to navigate.
By default, the Combined view opens with the Person option âShow detailsâ enabled. If that were disabled, there would not be a substantial difference between the default Relationships and Combined views. Mostly just that the Combined view has other tabs available. Also, the Combined view lacks the â+â button to add new parents or a new parter although the commands in the Edit menu are available and seem to work.
In Combined view, the other tabs (Events, Album, Timeline, Associations) show only the selected personâs information; none for the other people that are shown in the Relationships tab. Particularly for the Album tab, it would be interesting to show media for the selected personâs immediate relations. I donât think this is easily available anywhere else.
Also, it feels like an omission to not show the births/deaths of the children of the selected person in the Events and/or Timeline tabs. Additionally, the Events and Timeline tabs are showing almost exactly the same information in a slightly different format. The Timeline tab might be more interesting if it also displayed key events for immediate family? It is easy enough to display a Gramplet with the selected personâs events. Thus the Events tab could be considered redundant.
Also, is it possible to enhance the line and nodes shown in the Timeline view? Perhaps a different colour node for different classes of events? Like green for birth; black for death?
Personally, I rarely use the Associations feature and so have a tab that only shows that info does not seem all that useful. Do others use this so heavily?
I disagree strongly. Compare side-by-side with the same Filter and Quick View gramplet. (Both with the Siblings collapsed)
The original Relationships view is not overwhelming. It reads top-to-bottom with a separate row for each vital statistic. There is only 1 âtabâ so as you step through ancestors/sibs/descendants, you have a very concise set of vital stats to skim.
The Combined very is much more dense. It includes Place data clutter for the non-active people. The vital stats are in 2 column sub-tables of varying offsets, and row-spanning 1st column rows. It is far harder to grasp at a glance. The editing buttons (add, Edit, remove) are in varying positions horizontally. Some people have hundreds of tags. So that part of the display can go nuts. The 5 tabs have no indicators (bold face, icons) to indicate there is data populating those sections. So users may feel compelled to check 5 tabs for each change of Active Person. Which adds to confusion.
Combined View is a Power User view. It is great, exposes a lot of data breadth quickly and a huge advance. But is overwhelming.
We could make the Combined view look like the current Relationship view by default.
That sounds goodâŚ
Although it is really efficient to flip back-and-forth between 2 relationship views with different sets of gramplets. The original in bares-bone display and all families collapsed. The combined view in full data-deluge mode
Both views need a text wrapping feature (or horizontal scrollbar) for the Active Person section.
A long Name or date span with long place hierarchy can push the Thumbnail towards the right and squish the Gramplet sidebar.
And several people are confused by something I really, REALLY appreciate⌠that the Active Person is in the header section AND also in their birth order position among their siblings. I suppose the birth order row could be dimmed or have some other indicator.
Could I ask why waste anybodies time doing anything just leave both
alone and then people can choose their own preference.
I only use relationship view if I have to move a child from an incorrect
set of parents to another set anyway although I know other people have
more intensive use of both views.
phil
I donât mind making improvements to the Combined view. Suggestions are welcome.
The original Relationships view will continue to be available, but we probably wonât be making changes to it.