Jerry Bryan

The RM developers do not announce dates for future releases or future features.

It's my experience that the number of items that have requested through these forums that have actually made it into the product is extremely small. Simply being on the enhancement request list is not a commitment by the developers to add the feature to the product.

Jerry

I can't picture exactly how you would plan to use shared facts for major world events. For example, for Americans of the WWII era a major event would surely be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Would you really want that event shared with everyone in your database who was alive on December 7th, 1941? The event would become terribly redundant in reports. Or maybe I'm just not getting at what you are trying to accomplish.

Speaking just for myself, I am very cautious in how I use RM's shared facts. They do not play well with other genealogy software, and I don't want any of my data lost when it is moved into other genealogy software. Therefore, I use shared facts only to improve the appearance and readability of narrative reports. For example, I share a person's birth fact with the parents so that an event called Birth of Child appears in the parents' timelines. Similarly, I share marriage and divorce facts with each of the spouses being married or divorced. This causes the marriage and divorce facts to appear in the timeline of both spouses. RM's narrative reports do not normally place this information in an individual's timeline. Rather, this information is normally placed only in a separate timeline for the couple's combined events such as marriage and divorce.

If such shared events are lost when my data is moved into other genealogy software, the events themselves are not lost. All that is lost is the nice formatting of narrative reports.

Jerry

The page wouldn't come up at all for me.

Jerry

It's very different than what is already done. For example, suppose the group is descendants of John Doe plus spouses. Suppose John Doe's granddaughter Sarah Doe marries William Smith, so William is in the group. Suppose the left side bar is in Group mode and the main view is in Pedigree View. Suppose William Smith is not in the Pedigree View at all and suppose you click on William Smith in the group sidebar.

At this point, William Smith will be in the left most position of Pedigree View and the rest of Pedigree View will be completely empty (assuming William has not parents in the database). There is no indication anywhere on the screen that William is married to Sarah Doe nor how it is that William fits in with anybody else in the database. You can click the little red arrowhead just to the left of William to move him one position to the right. Sarah will now appear and it will be obvious that William is the husband of Sarah Doe and that Sarah is the granddaughter of John Doe. I'm simply asking for an option to move William one position to the right automatically under these circumstances so you can see on the screen how he fits into the family. In other words, the option would display both the newly highlighted person and their spouse.

I will certainly agree that clicking the red arrowhead to the left of William is not particular burdensome for any one particular person. Where it becomes burdensome is when you are scrolling up and down the group sidebar in the left panel. The same thing can happen in the index sidebar. I find myself constantly having to stop scrolling to click the red arrowhead.

What I'm suggesting should certainly not be the default mode of operation for the Pedigree View, but I think it would be very helpful for it to be a selectable mode of operation.

Jerry

I don't think we can really know what the user interface looks like until it comes out. I'm a Windows user who has a pretty strong dislike for the Mac user interface, and there are surely many Mac users who have a pretty strong dislike for the Windows user interface. We can all vote with our pocketbooks when it comes to purchasing computers.

The RM developers have stated that RM8 is being developed with a software tool that allows the same software code to run natively on both Windows and Mac. It's hard to know what that means for what the user interface will look like - whether it will look like Windows for Windows users and like Mac for Mac users, or just what it will look like.

Jerry