Hong Kong Chevy

Omigosh! I mostly have just used TMG, use the limited time I have to try to keep up with entering the data I have. But I just saw the message from Bob that it is to be discontinued, and that it is already too late to upgrade from v 8.08, which is what I have. I'm not too clear about what the differences are, but am guessing that whatever resources continue to be brought to upkeep, export (hopefully supporting a fair subset of features I use), will be limited to v9 at best, and will probably not support older versions.

I don't fault Bob, to whom I am grateful for creating such a great product for so long. I just hope there is some way ahead of continuing to use my data in some form, whether it is an emulation of Windows 7/8 within some future platform (usually clunky).

I don't want to wait until my computer eventually crashes, and I have no way to recover my data. I guess I could make regular gedcom backups and whatever reports best capture the data not included in the gedcoms, if I could figure out what that is. I haven't used any genealogy programs but TMG (and Second Site etc.), since starting out with some very primitive programs decades ago in the DOS era, and I dread learning their quirks, especially as reviewers see them as all lacking some of the nicer features of TMG. I have abour 7000 names, 37000 citations, which I know is less than many people, but is daunting to try to even partially recreate.

I know I should have kept up with this, but was busy with other things. I guess there is nothing much to do now except beat myself up for not noticing this earlier.

Whenever I print a Relationship Report, I get some exhibits not printing reasonably. Some of the exhibits just come out huge, or as much of them as will fit on the page. I tried reducing the size of the picture, but that didn't seem to help. The Relationship report does not have the option of some other reports to specify the size of the exhibit. I have had this problem for a long time, but finally decided to try to fix it so I could send it to a relative.

Most of the problems with exhibits turned out to be a problem mentioned on another thread. The Report Generator can't handle progressive JPGs. This is yet another of those quirky problems that can be worked around, but just make the program harder to use.

However, one person included in the report has a different problem. The exhibit prints out at a reasonable size, about 1 inch wide and 3/4 inch high, but the box around it is about 5 inches high, for no apparent reason. I tried changing the jpeg options, and even tried changing the aspect ratio and changing it to a png or bmp, to no avail. If I remove the exhibit, however, it works fine. Anyone have any ideas?

I am having this problem as well. With some charts, a Windows message comes up, and Visual Chartform crashes. With the sample project, as well as some charts in my project, it is okay.

I suspect that this may be related to something that happens when I try printing a relationship chart for this same part of the tree. Some of the pictures come out okay, but some are huge, which makes the formatting screwy. I tried deleting the exhibit and adding it again, but the same thing happens. The Info pane of Properties shows:

IMAGE

************************

External image file

Full name: c:\Users\Haakon\Documents\The Master Genealogist v8\Exhibits\Morris Shurgin (Jake Shurgin Family detail).jpg

341,464 bytes, 22 Mar 2012 22:54:12

Format 574x722x24

Exif file containing a JPEG compressed image and YUV 4:2:2 color space.

Exist thumbnail

C:\Users\Haakon\AppData\Local\Temp\TMG75205843\Th000459.jpg

28,833 bytes, Format JPEG 150x188

I looked at one of the pictures that comes out fine, and it says,

IMAGE

************************

External image file

Full name: C:\Users\Haakon\Documents\The Master Genealogist v8\Exhibits\Bessie and Dorothy Levin Aug 1909(detail from Levin Family, Ekaterinoslav).jpg

5,279,255 bytes, 24 Jul 2011 11:39:34

Format 1775x2511x24

Exif file containing a JPEG compressed image and YUV 4:2:2 color space.

Exist thumbnail

C:\Users\Haakon\AppData\Local\Temp\TMG75205843\Th000211.jpg

44,799 bytes, Format JPEG 150x212

So this picture is significantly larger than the other one, although I would guess they use the thumbnail.

I also have a 64-bit operating system. It is nice that finally I can make reports again. But it is frustrating that the first few ones I tried all crashed.

I had the same problem, and this is not a bad solution. I had to go through and change all the selections for the burial events, but now can sort the output by graveyard, then by section, and alphabetically by name at death within the section. Pretty sweet.

However, if I understand it correctly, this will have the side-effect that my report output now has women referred to by their maiden name all through their lives until their burial, when they suddenly are referred to by their married name. True, I could change all their events since marriage, but that would take a while, and I'm not sure I even want that.

A bigger issue is that I just did this to the women buried in Missouri, who are a relatively small part of my total tree. If I were to change all 2500 women's names for all post-marriage events, that would be an even larger task. So I guess I will either live with the discrepancy, or even change back to the default name for these women.

It probably would be possible to write a little program to do this, using John Cardinal's utilities. That would probably be the way to go if I wanted to always use the married name for all events. Then I could change the name for all events as I entered them from then on, although that could also get a little tedious, and it would be easy to forget.

This does do the trick, but it seems there should be some easier way.

Am I missing something, or is there a bunch of bugs in the filter feature?

1. One problem is in filtering dates. I often want to do something like:

Any Event... Year > 1870 AND

Any Event... Year < 1881 AND

(additional filters)

However, this gives me someone who died in 1621 and someone else who was born in 1922.

What I suspect is happening is that there are some events which are undated, such as number of children, (which aren't really necessarily associated with a date). When I add a date to the undated events and refilter, this extraneous person is excluded from the filter. Now, there are times one might want this, but of course the right way would be to allow comparisons to blank data (I think TMG calls this 0, and does this already) and also allow more sophisticated comparisons--in particular allowing more than one condition on the same piece of data. Then one could say,

(Any Event... Year > 1870 OR

... Year is empty ) AND

(Any Event... Year < 1881 OR

... Year is empty ) AND

(additional filters)

2. Another minor but very annoying issue is that if you have a filter and change certain fields, such as name or birth date, the filter rebuilds (slowly) and repositions the current person to be the first person on the filtered list. So if you are adding a number of pieces of data to the individual, you have to find that individual several times after adding each piece of information.

Now, I have found that _usually_ TMG remembers who the last person was, and so you can get back by hitting the Last button, which is better than having to say pull up the picklist. Occasionally it does not remember--I haven't figured out why sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. I can understand that it might have to recalculate the filtered list (although it seems it could be smarter about it, since usually only one person needs to be refiltered). But it should be simple enough to restore the person with the same id when it is through.

It is much easier to add these if one removes the filter first, but that means restoring the filter again which is also not ideal.

Incidentally, in the example above (in issue 1 with the dates), the filtered list is not rebuilt automatically, but one has to refilter explicitly, so this is inconsistent.

3. Occasionally, after rebuilding, the filtered list gets "stuck" with someone other than the one that should be first at the top of the list. I have found that one can restore this by changing the sort order and then changing it back, but it is disconcerting.

4. I have also had some cryptic error messages after filtering, after which I could not pick anyone from the filtered list at all. I had to restart TMG. Unfortunately I did not write down the message.

I have been using GedView for a few months, and it is basic but pretty good. The export and import work smoothly. I did have a few crashes early on displaying reports, but I think they may have fixed this.

http://www.mobilegenealogy.com/iphone-genealogy-software/

 

GedView looks very interesting and is being actively developed. It used the default iPad screen resolution which most other apps in the list don't.