I have been on a break from geneaology and just did the whole upgrade to v7 and was wandering around this site looking for help for some upgrade issues I was having. I stumbled on this thread and felt I had to respond.
First the whole get rid of the FoxPro both look and database. I think a number of people responded to the look question that echo the way I feel, I want large quanities of data visable on the screen. It helps me make questions and see things that I hadn't seen before. The baby food "clean" interfaces so popular today doesn't help me research. 32 clicks to get to what I want to see just makes me forget what I was looking at.
The backend FoxPro Unicode deal is a completely different issue. I understand why multi-lingual users need unicode, but I chose this tool so that I could hook on to the data with an ODBC driver and report on it any way I wanted. Unless WG is contemplating moving to an Oracle DB (which by the way will make the cost go up significantly maybe 20 times), I'd hate to see them change the database format. Because of the cost of the licensing of a third party database most vendors choose to use their own propriatary format. This makes the data completly in accessable without special SDKs and would make third party development of things like TMG Utility way less likely. I'd hate to see them move to some propriatary format that I couldn't use an ODBC driver with.
All of the remove icons, let me create my own screen with just my stuff on it, make apps bigger, clunkier, harder for the vendor to maintain, slower and more resource intensive to run. You will never get a speed improvement or fewer resources used by making the toolbar allow the user to remove icons, the configurable tool bar will load 100 times more code to support the remove, rearrange functionality then a few hardcoded icons. Requesting this functionality to speed up your computer doesn't make sense, however requesting this functionality to make data entry go faster when you have thousands of people to enter or edit might make sense. But you need to be aware that it will add to the overhead required to run the app.
I really hope the WG takes this thread with a grain of salt. This is virtually the only tool out there that works like it does. There are plenty of comercial tools that keep up with all the trends and interface styles, I'd say a lot of the TMG users are using this tool to get away from those issues, I just hope there are enough of us to keel them viable.
Version 8?
in Older Products and Versions
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I have been on a break from geneaology and just did the whole upgrade to v7 and was wandering around this site looking for help for some upgrade issues I was having. I stumbled on this thread and felt I had to respond.
First the whole get rid of the FoxPro both look and database. I think a number of people responded to the look question that echo the way I feel, I want large quanities of data visable on the screen. It helps me make questions and see things that I hadn't seen before. The baby food "clean" interfaces so popular today doesn't help me research. 32 clicks to get to what I want to see just makes me forget what I was looking at.
The backend FoxPro Unicode deal is a completely different issue. I understand why multi-lingual users need unicode, but I chose this tool so that I could hook on to the data with an ODBC driver and report on it any way I wanted. Unless WG is contemplating moving to an Oracle DB (which by the way will make the cost go up significantly maybe 20 times), I'd hate to see them change the database format. Because of the cost of the licensing of a third party database most vendors choose to use their own propriatary format. This makes the data completly in accessable without special SDKs and would make third party development of things like TMG Utility way less likely. I'd hate to see them move to some propriatary format that I couldn't use an ODBC driver with.
All of the remove icons, let me create my own screen with just my stuff on it, make apps bigger, clunkier, harder for the vendor to maintain, slower and more resource intensive to run. You will never get a speed improvement or fewer resources used by making the toolbar allow the user to remove icons, the configurable tool bar will load 100 times more code to support the remove, rearrange functionality then a few hardcoded icons. Requesting this functionality to speed up your computer doesn't make sense, however requesting this functionality to make data entry go faster when you have thousands of people to enter or edit might make sense. But you need to be aware that it will add to the overhead required to run the app.
I really hope the WG takes this thread with a grain of salt. This is virtually the only tool out there that works like it does. There are plenty of comercial tools that keep up with all the trends and interface styles, I'd say a lot of the TMG users are using this tool to get away from those issues, I just hope there are enough of us to keel them viable.