GenBridge – Has its time come?

[Mike Talbot 0]

Directly importing other popular genealogy program databases into TMG was a great idea and feature over a decade ago. There were few popular premium genealogy programs and they were fairly stable in those days.

 

 

In my opinion, all of that has been changing. New popular genealogy programs are rapidly born and soon die. Those that survive seem to change format details quite often, as does TMG. Spending resources on GenBridge appears to be becoming more and more ineffective and futile.

 

 

Perhaps those resources would be more effectively allocated to GEDCOM import and export support and added genealogy report/chart oriented features. In addition, serious FoxPro problems seem to be looming on the horizon and must be addressed, eventually.

 

 

Just food for thought and wishes for a great future,

[Jim Byram 0]

Unfortunately, it's more complex than that.

 

1) You're suggesting imported custom GEDCOM extensions created by other programs for their own purposes. Since these extensions are undefined, you have to figure out such extensions and constantly revise your import as they change.

 

2) In a number of cases, GenBridge does a better job than GEDCOM because there are data from other programs that are not exported to GEDCOM. GenBridge allows importing such data directly from the databases.

 

3) No matter how hard you try, there are significant amounts of data in any given program that simply won't fit into the differing data structures of other programs.

 

Bottom line... There is no perfect or even satisfactory solution to moving data between the databases of different programs. It takes a lot of work no matter how you do it and there will always be limits to what data can be transferred.

[Andy Hatchett 0]

Allocating resources to import and export support of GEDCOM is, imho, an utter waste of time. As more and more modern genealogy programs develop more bells and whistles GEDCOM becomes less and less relevant - Just look at the BetterGEDCOM Wiki that was just introduced.

 

As to the FoxPro issue...

 

Once version 8 is out the door that can be started to be looked at, assuming that it isn't already being looked at.

 

Once v8 is out it will, if past release history is followed, probably be at least 3-4 years before we see version 9.

Perhaps even longer as TMG will be on a new platform- and yes, I'm confident that there will be a version 9.

 

 

Directly importing other popular genealogy program databases into TMG was a great idea and feature over a decade ago. There were few popular premium genealogy programs and they were fairly stable in those days.

 

 

 

In my opinion, all of that has been changing. New popular genealogy programs are rapidly born and soon die. Those that survive seem to change format details quite often, as does TMG. Spending resources on GenBridge appears to be becoming more and more ineffective and futile.

 

 

 

Perhaps those resources would be more effectively allocated to GEDCOM import and export support and added genealogy report/chart oriented features. In addition, serious FoxPro problems seem to be looming on the horizon and must be addressed, eventually.

 

 

 

Just food for thought and wishes for a great future,

[Mike Talbot 0]

I agree with almost everything that Terry and Andy have said about GEDCOM and GenBridge. Sure, GEDCOM is not much, but it's all we've got to communicate data with most people who do not have the wisdom to use TMG. More people use the many shareware and other genealogical programs than those versions covered by "one-way" GenBridge. More importantly, sharing genealogy data must be a two-way street.

 

Besides, GEDCOM was only a third of my points. Using saved resources to add genealogy oriented features was the most important part of my plea. See all of the unanswered wish-list items over the past few years. Many have merit, even though some don't. Eventually addressing pending FoxPro problems was the third point.

 

Best wishes,