MacFamilyTree 6.0 (1001)

With MacFamilyTree 6, we rethought the way you enter your family data. And right now, there is no more intuitive and more practical way of entering your information that we know of. The new Family Tree Editor, a much enhanced version of the former Family Assistant, gives you both the structure, as well as the details. You'll see who is related to whom without searching lengthy lists, while editing a person's information is just a click away. That way, wether you are an experienced user or a genealogy novice, you will find the right person to edit in no time, so you can dedicate more of your precious time to research.

MacFamilyTree's user interface received a major overhaul for version 6. Choose from four distinct categories when working with MacFamilyTree - Edit, Views, Reports, Export. That way, you'll always know what you can do in any window at any given time and you'll find the feature you'd like to use more quickly. Either add new persons to your family tree, dive deeply into diagrams and reports or exchange data with other genealogists. The greatly enhanced navigation bar above the main window allows you to move forward and backward through the last windows you opened or conveniently jump back from a Person Editor to the Person Overview List with a single click. The modern interface safely guides you through all required steps so you can keep a record of your family’s history and explore your own past.

So does the family data you'd like to visualize span over 10, 50 or even 100 generations? MacFamilyTree 6’s charts scale up to a virtually unlimited number of persons and can be exported or printed, of course. New in MacFamilyTree 6: as soon as you click a chart type, that chart will open immediately and show the data of the first person in your family tree. Simply select a different person in the right-hand person list and the chart will refresh automatically with that person's data. Click a person within the chart and a context menu will open, providing shortcuts to other chart types with that person automatically selected. Be up to date with a person's context and ultimately with your entire family in no time. We listened very carefully to our users and starting with version 6, all charts in MacFamilyTree can be aligned left to right, right to left, top to bottom or bottom up. Use charts the way you like. Completely new: the Hourglass Chart which combines the Ancestor Chart and the Descendant Chart, as well as the Relationship Chart, which shows all the related persons who link person A to person B. If you work with one of Apple’s more recent MacBook or MacBook Pro portable Macs, conveniently use multi-touch gestures on the track pad to zoom in and out of charts, just like on the iPhone.

Compared to the reports introduced with version 5, MacFamilyTree 6 has a lot more to offer. Use the Narrative Report, for example, as a staring point for your own written family chronicle. MacFamilyTree will provide you with whole sentences summarizing a person's facts, taking away the problems of not knowing where to start and then having to go back and forth to turn lists of facts into a compelling story. Another addition to the reports will compile marriage lists and the existing reports about birthdays, distinctive persons, places as well as the Family Group Report have been greatly enhanced.

Research your family members online by accessing one of the largest databases in the world - with several million entries, FamilySearch.org is one of the leading resources for genealogists. By using this service, you may be able to gather information about relatives you didn't know anything about but their birth name, birth date and their parents’ names. If you want to collaborate with other genealogists or family members, simply choose data to upload to FamilySearch.org so anybody who researches the same person can make the connections which turned up during your research. Please be aware that FamilySearch is currently in the beta phase. During this phase, go to new.familysearch.org to sign up to the waiting list for immediate access. FamilySearch is expected to be widely available to the general public by the end of 2010.

In MacFamilyTree 6, places are handled in a completely new and more approachable way, you don't have to give up the workflow you're accustomed to, though. Every place name you enter for an event is memorized and offered by the auto-completion feature the next time you start to type that name again. But places aren't just names anymore - the Places Editor allows you to merge duplicate entries, see all events that took place there, take a shortcut to edit any event and the geo-coordinates you determine are overlaid on a 2D-world map.

MacFamilyTree has been very well equipped to handle photos and video files for quite some time, but what MacFamilyTree 6 does with that data is in a class of its own. Quickly browse your collection of files in the CoverFlow view or have your Mac display a fullscreen slide show. And the new Narrative Report can even be included in that slideshow. See the photograph of Great-Great-Great-Great-Aunt Penny in her 19th century dress entering the ferry while MacFamilyTree overlays her biographical data. Sometimes, the best features are the ones you didn't even know you were missing.

Research Laura’s date of christening, try to get your hand on Sarah and George's certificate of marriage and scan grandma’s birth certificate. Oh and what about the group shots from Pauline's confirmation? Once you get started, you'll always face a large number of tasks waiting to be performed and who doesn't forget something every now and then? Let MacFamilyTree help you keep track of your tasks with the To-Do-List feature. Prioritize and categorize anything that comes to mind and make sure you get to the most urgent matters first but don't forget about the small details along the way.

MacFamilyTree doesn’t restrict online research to FamilySearch.org and the integrated FamilySearch feature. Other services like Ancestry.com, EllisIsland, FindAGrave, FootNote, WorldVitalRecords or Google Search can be accessed from within MacFamilyTree with the new Web Research tool. Instead of opening these websites in Safari and manually entering search data, simply open the Web Research pane, select a person from your list, select the service you'd like to search and click the search button. If one of them comes up with new information in their search results, right-click a name and add it as a person’s family name or right-click a date and add it as a person's birth date.

Name any feature in MacFamilyTree - we improved its performance tremendously. Especially when dealing with very large family trees, you'll notice charts and diagrams are created instantaneously. Some areas that we paid extra attention to are the media file handling, the Virtual Tree and the data import/export process. On any recent Mac with Mac OS X 10.6 installed, MacFamilyTree 6 is executed as a 64-bit application, squeezing out even that last bit of performance so you have to wait less and will spend more time being productive.

The GEDCOM format is the one standard format which allows exchanging genealogy data between different genealogy applications. MacFamilyTree 6 greatly improves the GEDCOM import and export. To name just a few: version 6 now supports ANSEL encoding, as well as UTF-8, UTF-16, Plain ASCII, Mac OS Roman and Windows Latin export. Media exported along with the GEDCOM file can optionally be compressed. Partial export from single persons up to entire branches can easily be accomplished. What this means for you is maximum interchangeability with other genealogists across different applications and platforms.

MacFamilyTree 6 introduces countless other improvements of small to big magnitude which we can't possibly list here. The more prominent of them are:
A new startup window gives easy access to demo movies and support material
Multi-selection in Person-, Families-, Sources-, and Places Overview Lists
Faster response times in almost all charts
Set the name formatting independently for the Editor and the sorting order for names in person lists
Enter married names directly in the new Family Tree Editor

Mac OS X 10.5 - 10.6

What's New
Version 6.0

* New Family Tree pane
* Replaces the Family Assistant with a much more detailed and versatile edit mode
* Marriage Dates, Person Media, all types of events and notes can now be entered directly in the new edit mode
* Handles complex relations (e.g. multiple wives) much more accurately than the previous family assistant
* Group persons by generation using colored rows
* Different coloring mode for gender, labels or family relations
* FamilySearch Integration allows online research of ancestors

* New User Interface
* Features are arranged more clearly
* Browser-like navigation between panes
* Most parts of the User Interface are now augmented by Apple’s Core Animation
* Improved palette layout and reordering
* More concise user interface layout for charting and reporting views

* Completely Rewritten Charting
* Totally rewritten 2D charts
* New Relationship Chart visualizing the relation between two selected persons
* New Ancestor Chart supports up to 200 Generations
* New Descendant Chart with much better alignment
* New Hourglass Chart showing Ancestors, Partners and Descendants of a specific person
* Ancestor, Descendant and Hourglass Chart can be displayed from left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom up
* New Fan Chart offering more generations and better text layout
* New charts editor capable of single-page or multi-page layouts
* New statistics: Place of Birth and Country of Birth
* Create print-ready PDFs or PNGs
* New user interface for charts, a person list is always displayed to the right of a chart, allowing quick selection of a person right in place
* Greatly improved performance when compiling charts. You can browse through your charts in realtime
* Support for gestures on MacBook trackpads for zooming in and out

* Reports
* New User Interface for Reports similar to the new Charts user interface
* New Narrative Report
* New Marriage List Report
* Improved Person List Report which can now display groups depending on the selected sorting order
* Improved Person Report now featuring optional charts
* Improved Family Group Report now featuring optional charts
* Improved editing of Reports

* New Places Management
* All places you enter in the MacFamilyTree database is now listed in a new edit pane
* Assigning coordinates to places is much easier
* Merge places directly in the edit mode
* Assigning known places to events can now be accomplished with a few clicks
* Maps in the Persons Editor allow you to quickly review where a person has lived

* New To Do Management
* Create and assign To-Dos to any object in MacFamilyTree from within most edit modes
* Let MacFamilyTree 6 remind you of tasks that have yet to be done
* Set priorities and To-Do types
* Have MacFamilyTree automatically create To-Dos for missing names and events

* FamilySearch Integration
* Access to FamilySearch
* Update on FamilySearch
* Direct integration into MacFamilyTree
* Notifications for updated persons or newly added information
* Automatic background matching of persons
* Certified by FamilySearch.org for access, update and sync

* GEDCOM Import and Export improved
* Considerably more compatible with other genealogy applications which export non-standard GEDCOM files
* Partial GEDCOM export improved to export all connected persons from a specific person or all ancestors or descendants
* Support for ANSEL-formatted GEDCOM files
* The GEDCOM importer’s performance has been improved drastically
* Better error log when importing GEDCOMs
* Import error log can now be saved for later reference
* GEDCOMs can now be exported in UTF-8, UTF-16, Plain ASCII, Mac OS Roman or Windows Latin Charsets
* Media can be reconverted to a more compressed format when exporting GEDCOMs

* LDS Support
* LDS Support for Person- and Family Events
* All current temple codes available

* Media
* Fullscreen Slideshow implemented either for all media found in a tree file or for specific persons’ media.
* Narrative Report included in the Slideshow
* Using Apples Core Animation fur beautiful full screen display
* Cover-Flow like picture viewer for person, family, event and source media

* Web Search
* Integrated Web Search feature to quickly search the Internet
* Direct access to FindAGrave.com, FootNote.com, Ancestry.com, WorldVitalRecords.com and Google
* Directly assign found information to a person using the contextual menu

* Improved Labels
* Assign as many labels as you like to Persons, Families, Sources, Events or Media
* Labels, as well as bookmarks, can be assigned in all list views through the contextual menu (accessible by right-clicking on a row in a table)
* Much more user friendly labels palette

* Performance
* MacFamilyTree 6 is now executed in 64 Bit under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on recent Mac models for improved performance
* Performance is improved throughout the whole application, especially for larger tree files
* Media Browser performance is greatly improved for larger databases

* Other
* A start person can be defined. This person is used as the root person in all views when no other person is selected
* New startup window showing new tutorials and "how-to"s
* Multiselection in the person list, family list, sources list, places list and to-do list
* Drawing speed of the Virtual Tree dramatically improved
* Sorting order for names can now be specified independently from the name format used to display names
* Married Names can be entered directly in each edit view