Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Sunday, January 4, 2009

New program for PCs and Macs -- MyBlood

Thanks to Dick Eastman's online Newsletter for the link to a new genealogy program that will run on both PCs and Macs. It is called MyBlood. Right now it is in the developmental stage but it promises to have some outstanding features including being translated into any language. The program is presently available in English, Dutch, German, Spanish and French. But the program comes with tools to translate it into any language. The program has been developed by Vertical Horizon, a company in Belgium. The company is apparently owned by Geert Jadoul, a programmer whose experience goes back to programs for the Apple Newton, hand held computer in the 1990s.

MyBlood is available in an Alpha 2 download which means it is in pre-Beta release form. It is likely that some of the features do not work yet and the program is not stable and my crash. For the time being, the program is free and there is nothing on the Web site that indicates what the final price might be. I am always looking for new programs that run on the Macintosh, since I run both Macs and PCs side-by-side.

Some features of the new program, MyBlood, immediately caught my eye, one was the ability to show a media item and then assign people to the item, rather than the other way around. This feature will make it a lot easier to assign a photo, for example, to all the people shown. The program also claims to have implemented all of the GEDCOM elements, which means that it may be able to import data completely from any other GEDCOM compatible program. (See my previous post about GEDCOM).

From the menu items available it looks like the program will support all of the LDS or Mormon genealogical data fields as well as the Person Identifier from New FamilySearch.

I downloaded a copy for both my iMac and my PC and I am presently waiting for a license key to activate the programs. I will be very interested to see if the program has good sourcing and other features.

1 comment:

  1. "one was the ability to show a media item and then assign people to the item, rather than the other way around."

    That sounds like tagging people in a photo on Facebook.

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