Why PAWriter II Was Developed

If you are curious about why Personal Ancestry Writer II was developed, Howard Metcalfe has put together a page (accessed here) about why he developed PAWriter II:

Many years ago, the limitations of the old Mac PAF drove me (the author of PAWriter) to create a similar program without some of those limitations, and to rescue years of work already committed to PAF so it could be processed in today’s MacOS. Here’s a few of the objectives I wanted to and did attain.

The number of people on file and the size of notes for any person had to be virtually unlimited. The length of person and place name pieces had to be doubled. Some additional GEDCOM tags had to be accepted. Book writing (including automatic generation of an index) and HTML capabilities had to be added. PAWriter had to run equivalently under MacOS 9 and MacOS X.

For writing books, the notes wouuld have to carry the load of most of the book text. They would contain all of the evidence, substantiation, documentation, background information, clarification, interpretation and/or other relevant commentary pertinant to a person on file.

Along the way, I added additional features to PAWriter to assist in my research: basic pedigree charts, family group sheets, possible problem reports, self-checking of file consistency, etc. Ultimately the inclusion of pictures was added.

To navigate through very large numbers of people on file, a powerful “tagging” system was included. It provides flexible selection of subsets of people in a file by marking them as members of the subset using a host of selection criteria. Selections include inclusion, exclusion and intersection of the set of people meeting the criteria with those already tagged.

Some things PAWriter is not meant to do: LDS ordinances, complete GEDCOM compatibility as defined in the version 5.5 standand (and handled nicely by GEDitCOM), fancy charting and other bells and whistles that are included in other genealogical programs (no disrespect intended) such as Reunion. The emphasis is on secular research (including intercommunication with other researchers) and publishing.

As he mentions above, and in the rest of the article (the above are just excerpts), he talks about using PAWriter to write books.

Personal Ancestry Writer II Version 51 (27 April 2006)

Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II) version 51, 27 April 2006 is out and address an obscure bug that cropped up from the last release.

It can be downloaded here

Changes:
An obscure problem was uncovered with the automatically generated .bkp data file. In certain circumstances, there may be a conflict in file name extensions (the part of the file name after a period) in OS X which doesn’t occur in OS 9. This seems to have shown up when backing up to iDisk. Just in case, version 51 now generates a -bkp file (in both the OS 9 and OS X versions) — using a dash rather than a period — so there can be no file name extension conflict.

The new -bkp file will be generated the next time you save changes to your data file. Then you can trash any old .bkp file.

iRemember Scrapbooking Contest

If you are into scrapbooking, and have used iRemember from Intriguing Development, or are thinking about it, there is a new contest that you might want to join, using the software.. iRemember is Mac OS X “digital scrapbooking” software.

What you will be submitting is:

A single page scrapbook layout in one of the following sizes: (12″x12″, 8.5″x8.5″, or 8.5″x11″). The layout must be an original creation and can not be based on another designer’s template. It must be a non-published page and must not have been submitted for publication or posted in any online forum.

Full Rules. Grand Price: $100 gift certificate and a Sharpics D-Flector model DF-180 (basically a portable/fold-up studio for taking pictures of objects). Second and third place – $25 gift certificates.

Source: MacMinute.com

Personal Ancestry Writer II Version 50 (23 April 2006)

Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II) version 50, 23 April 2006, was released yesterday. This is a free Mac genealogy application that was written to have many of the same features found in the original Personal Ancestry File genealogy program (PAF for Mac), to allow for an easy transition for those moving from PAF for Mac. One of the new features is that it’s distributed in a disk image format, and the developer notes that if upgrading, you should only copy over the new version of PAWriter II and the reference guide – ignore the example data and scrapbook files.

Changes:
* Some minor cosmetic changes.
* Added rollover help for the Wallet button.

Birthdaybook 3.4

Birthdaybook, the Applescript application that collects and reminds you of upcoming birthdays, has been updated (version 3.4), to correct some errors from the migration to a Universal Binary. It integrates with Address Book and iCal, and can generate lists to be printed out as well.

You can download it here

Changes:
Birthdaybook 3.4 addresses an issue with Birthdaybook 3.3 not working on some systems with OS 10.3.9 or earlier. This was a problem with the new universal (intel/PPC) build style and has been fixed.

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