Family Tree Maker
Posted on July 19th, 2007 by Brian
The Family Tree Maker website is offering a free download of the beta 2008 software. It’s a biggie at 170Mb, so don’t bother if you don’t have a decent connection.
I took a look at it this afternoon and looks to be a big improvement over the older version I have. The main difference seems to be the way things are organised on screen and those with 14 or 15 inch monitors may find the new arrangement a little restrictive. So far 1600×1200 resolution seems to be about right, any less and I think I would have had trouble.
Having thrown a copy of my tree at it and had a good bash at breaking the software I am generally very impressed. In fact, so far my only real disappointments are:
- Still no export to html – this is a major omission IMO. Yes I know I can publish my data to the ancestry pages but I would have liked the option to be able to make my own site pages. Update: I found there are some facilities, rather well hidden though. It seems it is possible to export reports and media to html. Mmm… OK but not really good enough.
- The link to the Ancestry website is contained within the application and I can find no option to open using a browser. This repeats the same problem as the previous version, ie. it’s clumsy to have to go forward an back between the data page and the web page – perhaps they could consider leaving the personal details frame open so that data from the web can be cut and pasted without relying on the merge option.
- Yet again, the link forces me to the US version of Ancestry and not the UK version – I can find no way to change it.
- Place names now have a lookup function which seems to be very US biased. There is supposed to be a UK version of the app released in Sept 2007 but unless that one understand UK place names, the new function is very limited.
More later I suspect…..
Filed under: Genealogy, Hobbies
