21–30 of 53 posts
Nice! BTW I've never found a really nice, easy way to draw up organizational hierarchy charts (I've always used Dia or similar, and that's fussy), and I guess it's the same thing more or less?
Here's a demo of the same old C Graphviz program running on JS: http://viz-js.com/
I really like the overall approach - definitely a nice friendly way to edit a tree. The standard way for family trees to link children with parents is through the relationship of the parents. Did you avoid doing that on purpose? The problem with having a separate parent/child link for every parent/child relationship is that it gets very crowded if the parents have several children.
I really like the overall approach - definitely a nice friendly way to edit a tree. The standard way for family trees to link children with parents is through the relationship of the parents. Did you avoid doing that on purpose? The problem with having a separate parent/child link for every parent/child relationship is that it gets very crowded if the parents have several children.
I don't have experience in this area, but wouldn't the standard way get pretty messy in modern relationships, in which people have multiple children with multiple different alternating parents?
You'd have a pink relationship line for each partnership (that will be the same and just as messy in both approaches)
Then you'd have one child line from each relationship line to each of the children that came from that relationship, rather than two for each child.
So in a situation where Angus had 2 children with each of Beatrix and Chloe, you would have two child lines from the Angus-Beatrix relationship line and two from the Angus-Chloe line, rather than a total of 8 lines to show all the parent-child relationships in your current approach.
If Chloe also had two children with David then your approach would add a relationship line and another four child lines whereas the standard approach would just add the relationship and two more child lines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, that makes sense. I'll see how I can make it more intuitive
I recommend starting with one empty box (every family tree has at least one member) than an entirely blank screen.
I've been a user and fan of Geni.com for several years now. I wish they'd update their interface to allow some friendliness like this.
I've been a user and fan of Geni.com for several years now. I wish they'd update their interface to allow some friendliness like this.
Same. I've considered making my own interface for building family trees, as an exercise in UX design. But I'd want it to plug directly into Geni. You can't beat the feature to find other users' trees that match yours. Find long-lost cousins and great-great-great-whatevers that you didn't know you had.
Coincidentally, I was talking to my father about getting his family tree work 'stored' in some digital format for future generations. It struck me that a simple directory structure with info about each person in each directory, text files with info in, and then tar'd up would be about the most future-proof format you could get. Anyone else thought about this?
That might be the "easiest", but it's not the most portable, and would be a nightmare to navigate. I'd recommend he work in a software package that can export to GEDCOM. That's a structured data format used by genealogists to track relationships and metadata. The current version is 21 years old, and the original spec was designed in 1984. It's robust and industry-standard. Every single genealogical product worth its…
I agree it is widely supported.
One thing to watch out for with export is whether you are working with data that doesn't make it into the gedcom file.