Alas, my beloved, horribly out-of-date, and no longer updated genealogy program just plain will not work with Vista. It is for to weep. I spent a good chunk of last week and most of the weekend trying to find a reasonable alternative. The two most promising, My Heritage Family Tree Builder and Legacy both ended up being hugely disappointing.
MHFTB is clunky, ugly as hell, and in my opinion does not handle sources very well. Legacy was even worse. It was horribly un-intuitive, and worse, it’s source input menus kept leading me around in circles, until I wanted to cry. It’s worse than user-unfriendly, it’s actually user hostile. Oh, and it popped up a nag notice every time you tried to use a feature that is only available in the for-pay version. Why not just grey those options out, instead of making me click multiple times? What a pain in the ass! And no, I will not be upgrading to the full-featured. Why the hell would I want to give you money for making me cry?
So, I decided to try Family Historian. It’s kind of pricey (around US$60, I think), but the trial is full-featured. I’d much prefer a time limit than a feature limit. And the 30 days they give you is more than enough to give the software a good trial run. Which I’m doing right now. So far, so good. It seems to handle sources pretty well. It can actually copy events from one individual to another (yay!), and best of all, it works the way I think it should work.
There’s an FH upgrade planned for sometime this spring, but they are promising that anyone who buys now will be able to upgrade for free.
The other thing that is making me cry was that Firefox now seems unable to work with Ancestry.com’s proprietary image viewer. Ancestry has a work-around, but that only managed to crash Firefox. So I’m stuck using IE, which makes me feel like stabbing things with sharp, pointy objects. It’s not just my natural aversion to all things IE, either. The damned browser has security settings that require it to throw warning messages at you every time you try to view an image. And, as if that weren’t enough, when you try to save an image to a specific folder, it (un)helpfully overrides your decision, and puts it in a security threat folder. WTF?! And if you try to add Ancestry.com to IE’s trusted website list—in order to stop the insanity—it then starts popping open a whole new browser window every single time you click a hot link. That’s just plain not reasonable, when you’re doing a lot of searching.
I am doomed to be frustrated.
red paper boat 