So far, I've observed the following problems:
- Chrome is my default browser. RM requires me to close it and let it reopen Chrome with special settings in order to "Preview this website in my browser" from the local drive. That's a pain, especially if I lose where I'm at on some other website. Apparently, it's a security issue with Chrome that requires that it be launched afresh with the switch "--allow-file-access-from-files" which raises some risk.
- Internet Explorer 9 is happy to view the local website. Is it inherently more risky?
- Right-clicking on the Pedigree, Person or Family page for Print produces a nicely formatted report with footnotes but there is no hint of that that I have found. The average user might not even try. I would like to see a hover tip or a button labelled "Print formatted report".
- These print reports work well in Chrome but my IE9, latest update, makes a mess of it, at least in Preview; I don't have an Apple Air printer or other way of printing from iOS so I cannot speak to how these browsers do.
- The website is more or less friendly to tablet and phone screens. It displays fairly well on my iPad2 with some browsers but the touch areas are so small as to be error-prone without zooming, which is absolutely necessary for screens smaller than 9" or so.
- In all browsers that work at all, the popup for Notes has the last line obscured by the Note bar, unless it has trailing white space. That is not the case for the Source popup, although the Source bar crowds the last line.
- I have not found one iOS browser that works fully with the website. I have tried Safari, Chrome, Opera Mini, Atomic Lite, and DligoBrowser. Safari and Chrome are the most compatible. Except for Opera, perhaps, they all share an underlying Safari development kit. A common problem is that once you zoom when a popup is open, you cannot close the popup; you have to close the tab.
- Navigation down the Pedigree Chart seems to be governed by your historical navigation through the Pedigree View in RootsMagic. So is the dropdown child list under the + hotlink on the chart; the child at the top being the one that the < hotlink goes to. I don't think that makes much sense as I will have navigated the Pedigree View in ways that had more to do with adding and editing persons and families than with any aims as to how I want the website to work. I'm not sure if there is one right way but I would have thought that listing by birth order or by the child order I have arranged in RootsMagic would be sensible, with < leading to the top of the list as it does now. For navigation down the ancestral path to one person, it would be helpful if the drop-down child list color-coded the names. Additionally, instead of putting the next-in-chart child at the top of the list, that the name be highlighted in the drop-down child list. To override the navigate according to RM's historical navigation, I have come up with a SQLite query that clears the navigation history with the result that the website default navigation is to the first child in the RM arranged child order (I think); that also clears such history from the RM Pedigree View, losing whatever advantage it may have afforded.