jmurphy said: However, I am thinking about getting a (bigger) USB drive for my workplace that is a U3 Smart Drive (see http://www.u3.com/ ) and loading it with OpenOffice and EssentialPIM. I'll let you know how I like the portable EssentialPIM. Certainly the price is right (free).
Well, the whole U3 thing has been a bit of a bust.
I am still soldiering on here with my Win98 computer at home, which does not do U3, and when I am at work, I rarely have time to launch Essential PIM, so I haven't used Essential PIM -- I end up sending myself an email to remind myself about things or sticking info in a text file or Excel spreadsheet. Not very organzied!
Having the drive has been super for taking files back and forth, but for launching apps, I haven't done much.
So my latest hack is to install the PortableApps launcher on the USB drive (apparently the U3 Launchpad and the PortableApps Launcher can co-exist nicely) and I'm going to try Task Coach Portable. (That will also allow me to use Portable Firebird at work, which is newer than the U3 version of Firebird).
If I like Task Coach Portable for work, I may put it on my genealogy thumb drive too (along with a copy of Firefox with all my genealogy bookmarks).
ToDoList is a rare form of task management tool, one that allows you to repeatedly sub-divide your tasks into more manageable pieces whilst still presenting a clean and intuitive user experience.
It was written by a programmer to keep track of IT projects. One of the things you can do is to assign tasks to peoplw in your workgroup by name. I thought this might be re-purposed to flag different tasks with the surname the item belongs to.
I came across it while I was searching for portable apps -- there is an option to either put your preferences in the registry or in an .ini file, and if you choose the .ini you can run it from a thumb drive. Apparently. But I can't get it to work -- when I run the executable in the archive, I get an error.
Just wanted to post this in case it proved useful to some of you with more programming chops / newer machines than I have. I do like the interface and it would have given me a good excuse to learn XML.
Written by a company called Vertigo for (believe it or not) Microsoft this is a rich proof of concept rather than a full product, but does have some good interface ideas
Just had a quick play, very much a style over substance product, I like the tag cloud for the surnames, but it's very very slow on my laptop, might be usable on my desktop.
I have just downloaded Ubuntu 8.04 Genealogy desktop live CD. It's Linux based, boots from CD without amending your Windows installation (can also be installed under Windows)and includes Gramps Genealogy System, GeneWeb and Lifelines. May be interesting - I'll play with it over the weekend. Download at http://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=Linux_Genealogy_CD
I have been using Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition recently for the following reasons:
1) Although not very cheap, at £90 you are allowed to run it on three PCs which suits my needs for laptop and desktop usage
2) I had to give up on OpenOffice after three years as I couldn't get it to replace Excel properly.
In so doing, I have now got a copy of OneNote which I initially didn't use but now realise is fantastic:
1) You can cut and paste content in however you want as a real electronic scrap book
2) It is very searchable
3) It OCRs images as you paste them!
Yesterday, I was saving space on my shelves by cutting out articles, scanning them and pasting into OneNote to allow me to get rid of the clutter of old magazines. I was very impressed to find that as I pasted in a column of text it had been OCRd by the software and was already indexed! Saved me making up key words!
TCGR (thanks to Jane pointing me onto that, it's quite good in combination with FH, mainly because it adresses the problem that FH isn't localized whereas the localized programs aren't of the same quality but FH), thus the combination of FH & TCGR is ideal for me.
Home coded util to dig FamilySeach.org a bit more automated but what the webpage allows for.
and finally ... what I don't use any longer. FTM and Genelines, especially the last one isn't worth a penny. If only Genelines would have turned out to be like FH and TCGR. I'm still looking for a replacement, anyone with an idea ?
The author says it comes with its own Python and GTK environment. Since it uses a lot of little files, it may be best on a USB hard drive rather than a stick.
I've installed it, but haven't tested it out yet (it doesn't like my old Windows computer -- will have to try with XP).
I had Zotero recommended to me and it is excellent when web surfing. "Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. "
I put my different families into collections , take snapshots of web pages, add tags and notes for each item I find. http://www.zotero.org/
I have also just found a tiny /free GedCom Viewer which will work on a key drive called Simple Family Tree
Have you found any new similar software since 2007 worth mentioning.
Back to the original thread.
There are two products that I use that may not have been mention which I have found very useful
SnagIt v 9 which is a screen capture program. I use it alot and has the ability to Scroll down a page. Many screen capure programs only capture what is on the screen.
The other software is VueScan. I found this very useful as my scanner is now several years old and I can not get an Epson driver for 64 bit Vista for it. By using VueScan it gets round this problem because I think it does not use a Twain driver.
RalfofAmber said: On the subject of other software, and in particular something more research oriented, I ran into Deltadrive Genealogy Research System (GRS) www.deltadrive.co.uk.
Had a quick look at the Family History Fair but as it has no demo haven't invested in a copy.
Has anyone else looked at this?
Went to their website and was extremely impressed with the philosophy, but there's absolutely nothing in the way of screen shots etc to back up the fine words. Makes me suspicious.
Have emailed them for further info.
Maybe one of these fine days (if i can get respite from the family research addiction) i'll sort out all my Excel and Access fragments and put something together with VB.NET.
Ignore all the hype on his home page and look at the screenshot. What Behold does is look at your GEDCOM file and make a report that is human-readable, with a tree-style index on the sidebar. Right now it's read-only -- eventually he plans to have a version that will let you edit, too.
So -- let's say you want to find all the instances in your file of people who live on Chestnut Street. Fire up the search widget and enter 'Chestnut' and then you can skip right through and see them all, the same way you'd do if you had your GEDCOM file open in a text editor.
Peeking at the menu items, I see:
-- Export to RTF or HTML -- a way to specify your text viewer of choice -- you can pop up a separate window to view the GEDCOM at the same time, and compare -- a section called 'Behold Organize Info' which will pop up a tabbed window with data about your GEDCOM (what GEDCOM tags are in your file, how many times each one is used, etc) -- what things should be included in your 'Everything Report'
It seems to have divided my GEDCOM file up into four pools -- one family is my husband's father's family, one family is my husband's mother's family, the third is 'others related by marriage' and the last is 'everyone else'. That's the default, but there's a command to add, so perhaps you can teach the program better if you need a finer-grained approach. You can assign custom IDs to your families and to your GEDCOM files.
I think I like it -- especially for going through and looking for stuff that needs to be cleaned up, like instances of surnames in all caps, or screwy place names.
It's a neat little program.
Is it worth $20? Maybe. But if you download the beta now, you can get a key from the author and a 45-day trial for free.
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What other software do you use for Family History?
