Family Ties (Familienbande) – June 16, 2007

A new version of Family Ties/Familienbande was released a few days ago. It’s a free Mac OS X (and MacOS 8.6/9 with Carbon) genealogy application written by Stefan Mettenbrink. It is only available in German, but it can be used by non-German speaking genealogists who are willing to work out the interface. There is apparently an Intel-specific version available if you contact the author (the normal version runs fine on either PowerPC or Intel-based Macs). It can be downloaded here (familienbande-genealogie.de)

The following is a translation of the changes, using Google’s language tools. Any inaccuracies are a reflection of that and not the software developers.

Changes:
* When updating the person list, the current position is maintained
* The SOURCE buttons have a larger font, if source data is present
* Representation errors in statistics functions repaired
* If additional data was loaded, the original file name did not remain
* If “use last denomination” was selected, the new denomination did not always change.
* When removing indivduals, exceptions such as multiple marriage, etc. was not adapted
* In the plausibility check window, the exceptions are indicated
* In the plausibility check window, exceptions can be deleted
* During GEDCOM import, wrong dates were read in if the SOURCE record indicated an amendment date
* Errors in the print routine repaired
* Plausibility check can examine/evaluate dates now
* GEDCOM export computed the families incorrectly
* During GEDCOM import, when broken links are imported, it would result in an error. Fixed.
* Error with the import of GEDCOM dates which use (UTF-16) encoding is fixed
* During GEDCOM importing, words with special characters can be indicated by a flag for examination
* Errors in the list of persons repaired
* Assuming the last denomination did not always function
* Improvement of the reference pictures
* In the list of persons, persons with identical first names are sorted according to other criteria
* Backup function inserted
* Excel/CSV import improved
* Various smaller corrections

iFamily For Tiger v2.204

iFamily for Tiger V2.204 was released last week. iFamily for Tiger is a Mac OS X (10.4 required) genealogy application, and this is a major release/update, including improved picture editing, and additional navigation features in the Context Diagram NAvigation.

Changes:

Context Diagram Navigation
* Added navigation to the siblings of the Focal Person. When you right click on the Focal Person the pop-up menu now includes an option to promote any of the Focal Person’s siblings to be the new Focal Person of the diagram. The keyboard shortcuts for the previous and next siblings are Apple+UpArrow and Apple+DownArrow respectively.

Picture Editor
* Improved the cropping action when Portrait and Landscape modes are active.

Attach Existing Person dialogs
* Added a column for each person’s numeric identifier in the tables in each dialog.

Bug Fixes
* In the Picture Editor the list of Other References sometimes contained a reference that did not actually exist. The error also occurred in the list of “Other References” in the pop-up menu in the Picture pane of the main window.
* After disconnecting a spouse you may have received an error message that “Core Data could not fulfill a fault”.
* iFamily for Tiger got confused when you used Undo immediately after using “Add Unconnected Person”.

HoudahGeo 1.1.5

HoudahGeo version 1.1.5 is now available. HoudahGeo is a “geocoding” application for Macs – it allows you to embed latitude, longitude and altitude information into photos (“invisibly – no impact on the photo data). The photos can then be used in combination with Google Earth

It requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 and a digital camera.

Note: HoudahGeo is normally $34.95, but until version 1.2 comes out, it’s $29.95. A 1.x license is valid with all 1.x releases.

This version corrects two issues:
- Image loading – HoudahGeo could skip images when dragged in bulk to the application.
- Camera setup – HoudahGeo 1.1.4 would crash when the camera setup was modified after having loaded images.

Site News, Forums

I just discovered that our spam filter on our contact form worked a little too well. A lot of email was classified as spam, that shouldn’t have been. I’m working my way through the email manually and answering questions as fast as I can (I think I’m up to the beginning of June and have several months’ worth!).

I’d like to suggest that in the future, the best way to get a lot of questions answered about Mac genealogy software, and/or migrating to Macs is to register an account in the forums and post a question:

http://www.macgenealogy.org/forums/

That way it can be seen by more people, who can perhaps answer your questions better than I can, especially when it comes to Temple Ready, migrating from Windows, etc. Your email is hidden, and you are basically anonymous on there, in case you are worried about anything.

We are also finally working on two software areas that are interesting: Mapping software and notebook software. In the next few weeks we should be adding a lot of information about both.

Thanks,

- JD

iScrapbook 1.1.0

iScrapbook 1.1 was released today. iScrapbook is the newest Mac OS X scrapbooking application.

It requires Mac OS X 10.4 and sells for $49.99 and comes with over 40,000 photos/clipart. It can be downloaded here (ChronosNet.com/Products/iScrapbook).

Changes:
* Added several image optimizations that make the software more responsive and result in much smaller files when documents are exported in PDF format.
* There’s now an “Image Display Quality” preference that sets the resolution of images displayed in the software. The “Print Quality” preference sets the resolution of images when they are printed. So it’s possible to display lower resolution images in the software for faster performance while still outputting high resolution images in printouts.
* Text boxes can now be defined as Image Placeholders so when an image is dropped on the text box, the image will be cropped by the text.
* When a grouped set of graphics is selected, the resize “knobs” are drawn differently so the user knows that a group is selected. Plus, the inspector window provides a button for selecting individual members of the group.
* When an image is cropped, the inspector window provides a circular slider and angle field for precisely controlling the rotation of the image being cropped.
* Added Spotlight support. Spotlight can now be used to search for the title of a scrapbook page or for any text that appears on the page.
* Moved the iScrapbook album/page library to the Documents folder.

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