Some Comments from Simon 7/7/2002
Posted: 16 Nov 2002 10:06
I've been away for a few days and only got back on Wednesday, so have spent a little while reading through the recent batch of emails and thinking about them. It seems to me that quite a few people have some very strong messages that they want me to clearly understand, so perhaps I should feed back to these people what I think they are saying, to make sure that I've got it right.
A majority of the contributors over the last few days feel that I should have included conventional reports of the kind that you get in most of the other programs, including the free ones. Some of you are hopping mad about it, or feel badly let down. Some people feel that their expectations were raised inappropriately (one person said he felt 'cheated').
Some people have either not felt the same way, or been kind enough to defend me anyway. Their emails have not persuaded any of the 'antis', who have sometimes just been provoked by them into even stronger condemnation. One contributor says 'I look forward to Simon's comments'.
Well here are my comments: I am sorry. I apologise. I am now very firmly of the view that I should have included conventional reports of the kind you get in most of the other programs. I would estimate that I made many millions of decisions in the (rather long) time it took me to write Family Historian. And most of them I am pretty pleased with. But that one is looking pretty clearly wrong. I base that not just on the angry contributors to the mailing list, but on the number of support emails I get from people asking how to print the conventional reports. Its no fun telling people you can't do things. Its much more fun telling them you can.
There was a reason for it. It is very difficult to break into a well-established software market, such as this one. To do it, you need to be able to offer something that people can't already get elsewhere. I believe that F.H. offers a lot of things that you can't get elsewhere (see the Features and/or Philosophy and Goals page of the web-site at http://www.family-historian.co.uk if you want a list). I wanted F.H. to be very strong for its first release, and it was strong. But you can't have everything in a first release. You do as much as you can in the time you have (never enough - unless you're an amateur, doing it for fun) and you don't do things which seem less important, and which you think you can get away with not doing. What I call 'Conventional Reports' got bumped. It was the only big item on my Todo list that failed to make it into 2.0. In retrospect, that was a mistake. I should have bumped Merge/Compare to a later release and brought forward 'Conventional Reports'. But ! I was very keen to implement Merge/Compare. At the time I wrote it, I wasn't aware of anything like it anywhere, and I'm still not sure whether it has a rival out there or not. If you have relatives with whom you exchange genealogical information, for example, it ought to be an essential feature. There's no easy workaround if you haven't got it. So Merge/Compare would constitute a reason for buying F.H. By contrast, I didn't have anything very revolutionary in mind for Conventional Reports. It was unlikely that anyone would buy F.H. because it produced these types of reports. And if I didn't support conventional reports, there was a workaround for those who needed them: first, where possible, use F.H.s query-based reports. These produce tabular reports which are what you want for some purposes, and of course, with F.H.s query facilities, you can define your own reports, and include whatever information you want. If a tabular-style report is not adequate however (and for many! reports it definitely isn't), the workaround is to use some other genealogy program - e.g. a free downloadable one like PAF, if you haven't already got another one you prefer to use. They all do conventional reports (as several contributors to this mailing list, keep reminding me). I have never till now actually suggested this to anyone. I wasn't (and still am not) sure whether it would be a good idea to do so. Wouldn't it be seized on as an admission of failure? Or an invitation to use that other program instead of mine? Perhaps it is if reports are the only thing you're interested in.
I fully accept, of course, that this is only a temporary solution at best. In practice, the main problem I have found is that most other applications make errors in the way they support GEDCOM (there is a spec for GEDCOM - its very easy to establish which program is doing it right and which is doing it wrong); so moving data into other programs doesn't work nearly as well as it should. I have used PAF for reports with some success (PAF of course is free). It takes a minute or two to import a medium sized GEDCOM file, and it ignores and complains about all multimedia records, and some other tags, which it annoyingly, and wrongly claims are invalid. It also loses source titles, unfortunately. But if pictures and sources aren't involved, it doesn't do too badly. If you don't want to do that, (or if it doesn't do the reports you need) another option (mentioned in a couple of emails) is to use F.H. queries to generate a result set, which you save as a file; and you can then use y! our word-processor's mail-merge facility to generate your own custom reports using the file as a data source. This works much better for some reports than others. Long fields, such as Notes, don't work at all well like that. There's no question that it is fiddly to set up though, and of course only a small number of users who enjoy a challenge are ever likely to give it a go.
Anyway, there it is. It was a mistake. Unless there is a silent majority of fans of Merge/Compare who are being drowned out by the people who are not all happy about the report situation (which I doubt somehow), it would seem that I chose wrongly. Some people seem to think that I should have consulted the genealogy world and thereby avoided this mistake. But the genealogy world isn't available to be asked, and it wouldn't speak with one voice if it was. Not everyone (esp. laptop users, and users who habitually use lots of different software anyway) see reports as such a priority. And, of course, its much easier to get a good feel about what your important deficits are once the program is released and you start to acquire a customer base.
I hope everyone is aware by now, that providing satisfactory conventional reports, is my top priority for the next release. In fact, now that I have a customer base, I am very keen to make use of it to find out more about what people really want (or would want if they'd thought of it), and make sure that I do as many as possible of these things as quickly as possible. That's not easy, even if you have a customer base. There is probably much more of a consensus about reports than about most other things. My plan is just to absorb as many impressions as possible (it really helps when people send wish-lists incidentally, and they all get carefully logged), and then put together a proposed list for people to provide feedback on. Obviously no-one has to involve themselves in any way with any of this; but some people may want to take the opportunity to be part of the shaping of this program, and if so - thank you.
Several people have asked me what the policy is on upgrades. The plan is that we will have upgrades - probably to every release. I don't like the idea of making promises and open-ended commitments, like a politician, so I shan't. But I don't mind saying that there will definitely be an upgrade version for the next release, at least.
I don't for a moment suppose that this will bring to an end the discussion of Family Historian's failings on the reports front. Even if everyone currently contributing were bored with the topic, there will no doubt be other people joining soon who will feel the same way and who will want to talk about it.
And what about other complaints? Well, this email is getting too long. I don't want to get into the User Interface, right now, which is the other one I seem to remember people bringing up. There's a lot to be said about that - not least that one size is never going to fit all in user interface terms. And the same applies to genealogy programs for that matter. If F.H. isn't for you, that isn't necessarily a reflection on either of us.
Finally, for those of you who bought Family Historian with high hopes and who now feel disappointed - I'm very sorry to have disappointed you. However, I do suspect that in part as a reaction to their disappointment over the reports issue, some users have been less than fair in other areas. In my view (I don't pretend to be unbiased in this), you were right first time. Family Historian did and does deserve your high hopes.
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer
P.S. Thank you very much to all those people who have been very supportive both here in the mailing list, and in emails.
A majority of the contributors over the last few days feel that I should have included conventional reports of the kind that you get in most of the other programs, including the free ones. Some of you are hopping mad about it, or feel badly let down. Some people feel that their expectations were raised inappropriately (one person said he felt 'cheated').
Some people have either not felt the same way, or been kind enough to defend me anyway. Their emails have not persuaded any of the 'antis', who have sometimes just been provoked by them into even stronger condemnation. One contributor says 'I look forward to Simon's comments'.
Well here are my comments: I am sorry. I apologise. I am now very firmly of the view that I should have included conventional reports of the kind you get in most of the other programs. I would estimate that I made many millions of decisions in the (rather long) time it took me to write Family Historian. And most of them I am pretty pleased with. But that one is looking pretty clearly wrong. I base that not just on the angry contributors to the mailing list, but on the number of support emails I get from people asking how to print the conventional reports. Its no fun telling people you can't do things. Its much more fun telling them you can.
There was a reason for it. It is very difficult to break into a well-established software market, such as this one. To do it, you need to be able to offer something that people can't already get elsewhere. I believe that F.H. offers a lot of things that you can't get elsewhere (see the Features and/or Philosophy and Goals page of the web-site at http://www.family-historian.co.uk if you want a list). I wanted F.H. to be very strong for its first release, and it was strong. But you can't have everything in a first release. You do as much as you can in the time you have (never enough - unless you're an amateur, doing it for fun) and you don't do things which seem less important, and which you think you can get away with not doing. What I call 'Conventional Reports' got bumped. It was the only big item on my Todo list that failed to make it into 2.0. In retrospect, that was a mistake. I should have bumped Merge/Compare to a later release and brought forward 'Conventional Reports'. But ! I was very keen to implement Merge/Compare. At the time I wrote it, I wasn't aware of anything like it anywhere, and I'm still not sure whether it has a rival out there or not. If you have relatives with whom you exchange genealogical information, for example, it ought to be an essential feature. There's no easy workaround if you haven't got it. So Merge/Compare would constitute a reason for buying F.H. By contrast, I didn't have anything very revolutionary in mind for Conventional Reports. It was unlikely that anyone would buy F.H. because it produced these types of reports. And if I didn't support conventional reports, there was a workaround for those who needed them: first, where possible, use F.H.s query-based reports. These produce tabular reports which are what you want for some purposes, and of course, with F.H.s query facilities, you can define your own reports, and include whatever information you want. If a tabular-style report is not adequate however (and for many! reports it definitely isn't), the workaround is to use some other genealogy program - e.g. a free downloadable one like PAF, if you haven't already got another one you prefer to use. They all do conventional reports (as several contributors to this mailing list, keep reminding me). I have never till now actually suggested this to anyone. I wasn't (and still am not) sure whether it would be a good idea to do so. Wouldn't it be seized on as an admission of failure? Or an invitation to use that other program instead of mine? Perhaps it is if reports are the only thing you're interested in.
I fully accept, of course, that this is only a temporary solution at best. In practice, the main problem I have found is that most other applications make errors in the way they support GEDCOM (there is a spec for GEDCOM - its very easy to establish which program is doing it right and which is doing it wrong); so moving data into other programs doesn't work nearly as well as it should. I have used PAF for reports with some success (PAF of course is free). It takes a minute or two to import a medium sized GEDCOM file, and it ignores and complains about all multimedia records, and some other tags, which it annoyingly, and wrongly claims are invalid. It also loses source titles, unfortunately. But if pictures and sources aren't involved, it doesn't do too badly. If you don't want to do that, (or if it doesn't do the reports you need) another option (mentioned in a couple of emails) is to use F.H. queries to generate a result set, which you save as a file; and you can then use y! our word-processor's mail-merge facility to generate your own custom reports using the file as a data source. This works much better for some reports than others. Long fields, such as Notes, don't work at all well like that. There's no question that it is fiddly to set up though, and of course only a small number of users who enjoy a challenge are ever likely to give it a go.
Anyway, there it is. It was a mistake. Unless there is a silent majority of fans of Merge/Compare who are being drowned out by the people who are not all happy about the report situation (which I doubt somehow), it would seem that I chose wrongly. Some people seem to think that I should have consulted the genealogy world and thereby avoided this mistake. But the genealogy world isn't available to be asked, and it wouldn't speak with one voice if it was. Not everyone (esp. laptop users, and users who habitually use lots of different software anyway) see reports as such a priority. And, of course, its much easier to get a good feel about what your important deficits are once the program is released and you start to acquire a customer base.
I hope everyone is aware by now, that providing satisfactory conventional reports, is my top priority for the next release. In fact, now that I have a customer base, I am very keen to make use of it to find out more about what people really want (or would want if they'd thought of it), and make sure that I do as many as possible of these things as quickly as possible. That's not easy, even if you have a customer base. There is probably much more of a consensus about reports than about most other things. My plan is just to absorb as many impressions as possible (it really helps when people send wish-lists incidentally, and they all get carefully logged), and then put together a proposed list for people to provide feedback on. Obviously no-one has to involve themselves in any way with any of this; but some people may want to take the opportunity to be part of the shaping of this program, and if so - thank you.
Several people have asked me what the policy is on upgrades. The plan is that we will have upgrades - probably to every release. I don't like the idea of making promises and open-ended commitments, like a politician, so I shan't. But I don't mind saying that there will definitely be an upgrade version for the next release, at least.
I don't for a moment suppose that this will bring to an end the discussion of Family Historian's failings on the reports front. Even if everyone currently contributing were bored with the topic, there will no doubt be other people joining soon who will feel the same way and who will want to talk about it.
And what about other complaints? Well, this email is getting too long. I don't want to get into the User Interface, right now, which is the other one I seem to remember people bringing up. There's a lot to be said about that - not least that one size is never going to fit all in user interface terms. And the same applies to genealogy programs for that matter. If F.H. isn't for you, that isn't necessarily a reflection on either of us.
Finally, for those of you who bought Family Historian with high hopes and who now feel disappointed - I'm very sorry to have disappointed you. However, I do suspect that in part as a reaction to their disappointment over the reports issue, some users have been less than fair in other areas. In my view (I don't pretend to be unbiased in this), you were right first time. Family Historian did and does deserve your high hopes.
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer
P.S. Thank you very much to all those people who have been very supportive both here in the mailing list, and in emails.
