"FaceLift" review
Mar 11, 2022 8:20:20 GMT -8
Post by Uncle Buddy on Mar 11, 2022 8:20:20 GMT -8
I opened this free demo of a genieware I'll call FaceLift earlier today for the first time and immediately closed it since I didn't have time to do anything. I had glanced at the sample family tree and closed the program.
I just opened FaceLift again, and now there are two sample trees. One says it was changed earlier today. Why would it say that? I didn't change anything. I opened the other one.
A dialog opened up informing me that the file had been already converted and asking me if I wanted to convert it again.
Converted to what? Catholicism? Buddhism? I don't have a clue what this dialog could possibly be trying to tell me, having not used the program before and not being the person who invented the weird terminology that I, the first-time user, am supposed to magically understand as if I had invented it myself. I'll take my chances and say OK. Hope my computer doesn't melt.
I wonder if "conversion" is a genealogy term I haven't heard. I don't think I'll google it.
A little unseeable thumbnail picture for each person and two little pictures for what appears to be the current person. No way to change background and font colors. The usual complaints. I'll try not to repeat myself. Let's find something new to complain about.
To be honest I think this software might be usable.
I don't like the fact that it's still using the "spouse" terminology for all couples, as if marriage were an element of genealogy. It is not. Marriage is an event, and it has nothing to do with children. An offspring event is one kind of event, a marriage event is another kind of event.
I don't like seeing a choice between birth and christening. What is christening? What if no one in my tree is a Christian? Do I have to see that word next to birth on a main heading? Birth is a physical event, a biological fact, and baptism is a rite of the Christian churches. Maybe christening and baptism are synonyms. I should google it.
The interface is too busy and crowded, but it honestly looks better than just about anything I've ever seen, at first glance. So I'll give it a go. Who knows, maybe it will be so great I'll just stop writing Treebard and do genealogy instead. The reason I started writing Treebard was that I had no software that I wanted to use for doing genealogy. But with so much going on, what if I were to increase the font size? I'm afraid to try, it might spoil the design. Or if it doesn't work, which it probably won't, it might spoil this ravingly positive review.
I closed the program and re-opened it to a new blank file. I was given a choice of where to store my file. Treebard doesn't bother with that since it's going to be a portable program, or since I haven't gotten around to it yet, I'm not sure which.
They're still using given names and surnames. The whole name should go in one field. Treebard has a full name field and a sorting field, so the program knows which part of the name should be used for alphabetizing it. We shouldn't assume that everyone does names like we do, with one or more given names and a surname.
Unlike many geniewares, FaceLift makes it easy to enter the first person. A dialog opens up. You can enter names, occupation etc. Do people have only one occupation? That seems oddly restrictive. I don't want to put anyone in some occupation box. Treebard puts any number of occupations in the same table for a person, dated or undated. When I start typing the occupation, suggestions pop up. Remind me not to do that in Treebard. I know what I want to type, and autofill is better than having to reach over to the arrows or tab keys to choose something. Typing is faster. Especially if suggestions just fill in while I'm typing. Lists of suggestions don't speed anything up.
Child status? What the heck is that? Some of the choices are mysteries to me. Let's stick to the basics. Too much detail here.
Signature? What the heck is that? Looking at the choices doesn't help. I just want to do genealogy.
When I type the surname correctly, with the initial letter capitalized, the program changes the name to all caps. This is wrong. The program should never change the capitalization of any name. The user should decide how to capitalize all names. THERE SHOULD NOT EVEN BE AN OPTION TO CHANGE SURNAMES TO ALL CAPS, KNOW WHAT i MEAN? This is an outdated feature. It's a throwback to the typewriter days, when we had precious little to help us navigate a page of data. Typing surnames in all caps was an attempt to write code into the appearance of words with specific functions. We can do thousands of times better than that now.
The dialog for entering a new person is pretty big. The entire right half of it is a weird graphic with a dark background and some dots, but no inputs. I'm dying to find out what the heck that is supposed to be or do. I'll let you know if I find out. (I never did find out. The big dark area disappeared at some point.)
The place-of-birth input shows suggestions with pre-loaded nested places. The place I want is there, and correct, though it's illegible when it fills in since the design doesn't leave room for the whole thing to display, and the name of the state I was born is not only in all caps, it's abbreviated, and with an obsolete abbreviation. I can't tell if the country of birth is even shown. In spite of the fact that I'm still using size 10 font, the whole place name can't be read. And the nested places are delimited with dashes instead of commas.
Leaving the death inputs blank, I click OK and the new person is shown on a chart with capitalized surname, the name in reverse order like this: SURNAME, First Middle. This is so very wrong. Nobody calls me ROBERTSON Scott. That is not my name.
The display shows my town and county of birth but omits the other nestings like state and country. Wrong. What's gonna be visible if I increase the font size? Remind me to try that. First I have more complaints. The single occupation I was encouraged to enter is listed under my name like a third arm. Happily enough, I haven't had that occupation since 1996. What happens if I delete it? Can I add another one as an event or attribute, with or without a date or range of dates?
Some hieroglyphics over in the corner announce "1 (G 1)" followed by a tiny icon I can't make out. Is it a cartoonish "male" with a yellow head, or a light bulb? Clicking and hovering the hieroglyphics don't help me understand.
Beneath the place where my name and birth data are displayed, it is loudly announced that I am childless and have no spouse. Could these decisions not be made and displayed by default? This is bad design, thoroughly unfriendly. What's needed is a place to input data, not an announcement that data hasn't been input yet.
My name is shown, wrongly formatted and in backwards order, in three separate places on the same view. My so-called occupation is shown twice in the same view. The hieroglyphics I mentioned are shown twice, and I guess it has something to do with Ahnentafel, a topic I would want to see if I wanted to see it, not by default on the front page. Remember math class in school? What was the scariest part? That's right, all the undecipherable notation put there apparently to make the subject look very technical.
A cartoon of a Male is shown where my picture would be. Bad taste in art is one of my favorite things to complain about. Clip art doesn't belong in software for adults. In Treebard the user can select his own placeholder graphic.
The internet is full of beautiful old photos of every place on earth. Treebard suggests that if you don't have a photo of a person, you use a vintage photo of where they lived. Anything's better than clip art.
In my condition of blind groping, I accidentally double click something and what appears to be an edit screen opens up. I delete the single allowed occupation but then can't find an OK or CANCEL button. How do I get back to the main view? This should be obvious. Oh, I see. The editing was done on a tab called DATA and if I click the tab called FAMILY, I see the occupation has been deleted. Why is the tab called FAMILY? I didn't input any families. Family trees are made up of individuals, events, places, dates, the elements of genealogy. Family is just a social agreement. Genieware has no business deciding for me what is or is not a family. Treebard displays the current person's partners and the children of the partnership. You can call that a family if you want. Kinda depends on what you think a family is. That's a personal thing.
I click something called "Other Person Events" but nothing happens. I was hoping to input some career attributes or occupations with dates. But also halfway hoping it would be impossible so I'd have even more to complain about. I really need to fix that little font, too. A good part of the interface is brightly glaring at me and my vision is starting to fade.
By the way, places should not come pre-loaded. This is bloat. The genealogist should enter his own places, as they are described in sources. No wonder this application occupies over 3/4 of a gigabyte on my hard drive. It's preloaded with every teeny burg I've every dwelt within.
I click on a tab called HISTORY and what shows is a display that might be from Google Maps, of the place name I selected as my place of birth. When did I give FaceLift permission to use my internet connection? Is there a way to turn this off in Preferences? Don't I have a browser so that I can use Google Maps when and if I choose?
On the DATA tab I finally discover a tab called FACTS. I've delivered this lecture before: there are no facts in genealogy. There is evidence which leads us to make assertions and come to conclusions. Very little is ever proven if you go back in time far enough to make genealogy worth the time it takes to enter data. Data are not facts. One problem is that events and attributes have a fuzzy delineation, so some genieware designers just call them "facts" in order to avoid distinguishing them from each other. But let me see if I can enter some factoids, at least.
The input table has three columns: Facts, Descr, and N.
I can guess what Descr means. "N" might mean Note? Aren't notes long enough to deserve a fully-spelled-out column heading so I don't have to guess what to do? The bright interface is getting to me. Clicking in the table does nothing. This is discouraging. Oh look, there's a "+" button. Why can't I just click into or tab into the table and start typing? All these extra mouse clickings are annoying. Well nothing worked.
Below this table which will apparently remain empty, there's a table with a column labeled Events and a column labeled Year. The table is for truncated data with resizable columns. Don't get me started on resizable columns. To the right of that is an input area much larger than the tiny table itself. Why do genieware designers treat the events of a person's life as an afterthought? Here I can enter an occupation, full date, nested place, age, etc. Some of what I enter will display in the tiny table. Then the input area will sit there empty and unused, taking up 2-1/2 times more space than the table where the entered events are (partially, truncatedly) displayed.
In Treebard, the events table is a big deal. I've been working on it on and off for almost four years. It takes up a lot of space. You can read all the words you input to it. The input area and the display area are the same area, because you input data directly into the table where it's displayed. This design feature was inspired by a program called Genbox which you should buy if you can get its creator to sell it to you. It's not perfect but it's the best genieware I've found, by far. Of course, Treebard's similar events table is a big improvement over the Genbox event table that helped to inspire it, a big improvement in many ways.
With an occupation entered, I can see that the tiny table on the left is really a contents listing thing I can click on to show the stuff I entered. The tiny table shows "occ" for occupation, "1996" instead of the whole date, and when you click or arrow into a row in the tiny table, the input area becomes a display area for the data I had actually entered. For ONE event at a time. This is not how you tell a story. In Genbox and in Treebard, a table full of events, one row for each event, stretches across a great big area of screen space. Sorted by date, it tells the story of a human being's life.
Looking for a tab dedicated to places, I find a second tab dedicated to advertising Google Maps or some other mapping website, at the expense of my internet connection. I must have given FaceLift permission to use my internet connection, but how do I revoke it? I haven't paid for FaceLift yet, but they're not gonna pay for my internet connection, so why are they using it to advertise some mapping website? Sorry for the rant, but I'm going blind. There's apparently no way to make this interface a dark color.
Believe it or not, FaceLift is one of the better programs I've found. I don't know why I say that. Something about it is less annoying than the other geniewares. I'll let you know if I figure out what it is. But first, I have to see what havoc is wreaked if I try to change the font size to something I can see without tipping my head to a certain angle, blinking several times, and trying to relax the muscles in my face so my eyes will focus against the glare of a whitish background and size 10 fonts.
I change the font size to 14 and nothing (nothing) changes.
I close the tree and re-open it. No change.
I close the whole program and re-open it. Nope. Size 10 fonts, as declared standard by Microsoft back in the dark ages of Windows. I mean the first dark ages of Windows.
Goodbye FaceLift, I barely seen ya.
I just opened FaceLift again, and now there are two sample trees. One says it was changed earlier today. Why would it say that? I didn't change anything. I opened the other one.
A dialog opened up informing me that the file had been already converted and asking me if I wanted to convert it again.
Converted to what? Catholicism? Buddhism? I don't have a clue what this dialog could possibly be trying to tell me, having not used the program before and not being the person who invented the weird terminology that I, the first-time user, am supposed to magically understand as if I had invented it myself. I'll take my chances and say OK. Hope my computer doesn't melt.
I wonder if "conversion" is a genealogy term I haven't heard. I don't think I'll google it.
A little unseeable thumbnail picture for each person and two little pictures for what appears to be the current person. No way to change background and font colors. The usual complaints. I'll try not to repeat myself. Let's find something new to complain about.
To be honest I think this software might be usable.
I don't like the fact that it's still using the "spouse" terminology for all couples, as if marriage were an element of genealogy. It is not. Marriage is an event, and it has nothing to do with children. An offspring event is one kind of event, a marriage event is another kind of event.
I don't like seeing a choice between birth and christening. What is christening? What if no one in my tree is a Christian? Do I have to see that word next to birth on a main heading? Birth is a physical event, a biological fact, and baptism is a rite of the Christian churches. Maybe christening and baptism are synonyms. I should google it.
The interface is too busy and crowded, but it honestly looks better than just about anything I've ever seen, at first glance. So I'll give it a go. Who knows, maybe it will be so great I'll just stop writing Treebard and do genealogy instead. The reason I started writing Treebard was that I had no software that I wanted to use for doing genealogy. But with so much going on, what if I were to increase the font size? I'm afraid to try, it might spoil the design. Or if it doesn't work, which it probably won't, it might spoil this ravingly positive review.
I closed the program and re-opened it to a new blank file. I was given a choice of where to store my file. Treebard doesn't bother with that since it's going to be a portable program, or since I haven't gotten around to it yet, I'm not sure which.
They're still using given names and surnames. The whole name should go in one field. Treebard has a full name field and a sorting field, so the program knows which part of the name should be used for alphabetizing it. We shouldn't assume that everyone does names like we do, with one or more given names and a surname.
Unlike many geniewares, FaceLift makes it easy to enter the first person. A dialog opens up. You can enter names, occupation etc. Do people have only one occupation? That seems oddly restrictive. I don't want to put anyone in some occupation box. Treebard puts any number of occupations in the same table for a person, dated or undated. When I start typing the occupation, suggestions pop up. Remind me not to do that in Treebard. I know what I want to type, and autofill is better than having to reach over to the arrows or tab keys to choose something. Typing is faster. Especially if suggestions just fill in while I'm typing. Lists of suggestions don't speed anything up.
Child status? What the heck is that? Some of the choices are mysteries to me. Let's stick to the basics. Too much detail here.
Signature? What the heck is that? Looking at the choices doesn't help. I just want to do genealogy.
When I type the surname correctly, with the initial letter capitalized, the program changes the name to all caps. This is wrong. The program should never change the capitalization of any name. The user should decide how to capitalize all names. THERE SHOULD NOT EVEN BE AN OPTION TO CHANGE SURNAMES TO ALL CAPS, KNOW WHAT i MEAN? This is an outdated feature. It's a throwback to the typewriter days, when we had precious little to help us navigate a page of data. Typing surnames in all caps was an attempt to write code into the appearance of words with specific functions. We can do thousands of times better than that now.
The dialog for entering a new person is pretty big. The entire right half of it is a weird graphic with a dark background and some dots, but no inputs. I'm dying to find out what the heck that is supposed to be or do. I'll let you know if I find out. (I never did find out. The big dark area disappeared at some point.)
The place-of-birth input shows suggestions with pre-loaded nested places. The place I want is there, and correct, though it's illegible when it fills in since the design doesn't leave room for the whole thing to display, and the name of the state I was born is not only in all caps, it's abbreviated, and with an obsolete abbreviation. I can't tell if the country of birth is even shown. In spite of the fact that I'm still using size 10 font, the whole place name can't be read. And the nested places are delimited with dashes instead of commas.
Leaving the death inputs blank, I click OK and the new person is shown on a chart with capitalized surname, the name in reverse order like this: SURNAME, First Middle. This is so very wrong. Nobody calls me ROBERTSON Scott. That is not my name.
The display shows my town and county of birth but omits the other nestings like state and country. Wrong. What's gonna be visible if I increase the font size? Remind me to try that. First I have more complaints. The single occupation I was encouraged to enter is listed under my name like a third arm. Happily enough, I haven't had that occupation since 1996. What happens if I delete it? Can I add another one as an event or attribute, with or without a date or range of dates?
Some hieroglyphics over in the corner announce "1 (G 1)" followed by a tiny icon I can't make out. Is it a cartoonish "male" with a yellow head, or a light bulb? Clicking and hovering the hieroglyphics don't help me understand.
Beneath the place where my name and birth data are displayed, it is loudly announced that I am childless and have no spouse. Could these decisions not be made and displayed by default? This is bad design, thoroughly unfriendly. What's needed is a place to input data, not an announcement that data hasn't been input yet.
My name is shown, wrongly formatted and in backwards order, in three separate places on the same view. My so-called occupation is shown twice in the same view. The hieroglyphics I mentioned are shown twice, and I guess it has something to do with Ahnentafel, a topic I would want to see if I wanted to see it, not by default on the front page. Remember math class in school? What was the scariest part? That's right, all the undecipherable notation put there apparently to make the subject look very technical.
A cartoon of a Male is shown where my picture would be. Bad taste in art is one of my favorite things to complain about. Clip art doesn't belong in software for adults. In Treebard the user can select his own placeholder graphic.
The internet is full of beautiful old photos of every place on earth. Treebard suggests that if you don't have a photo of a person, you use a vintage photo of where they lived. Anything's better than clip art.
In my condition of blind groping, I accidentally double click something and what appears to be an edit screen opens up. I delete the single allowed occupation but then can't find an OK or CANCEL button. How do I get back to the main view? This should be obvious. Oh, I see. The editing was done on a tab called DATA and if I click the tab called FAMILY, I see the occupation has been deleted. Why is the tab called FAMILY? I didn't input any families. Family trees are made up of individuals, events, places, dates, the elements of genealogy. Family is just a social agreement. Genieware has no business deciding for me what is or is not a family. Treebard displays the current person's partners and the children of the partnership. You can call that a family if you want. Kinda depends on what you think a family is. That's a personal thing.
I click something called "Other Person Events" but nothing happens. I was hoping to input some career attributes or occupations with dates. But also halfway hoping it would be impossible so I'd have even more to complain about. I really need to fix that little font, too. A good part of the interface is brightly glaring at me and my vision is starting to fade.
By the way, places should not come pre-loaded. This is bloat. The genealogist should enter his own places, as they are described in sources. No wonder this application occupies over 3/4 of a gigabyte on my hard drive. It's preloaded with every teeny burg I've every dwelt within.
I click on a tab called HISTORY and what shows is a display that might be from Google Maps, of the place name I selected as my place of birth. When did I give FaceLift permission to use my internet connection? Is there a way to turn this off in Preferences? Don't I have a browser so that I can use Google Maps when and if I choose?
On the DATA tab I finally discover a tab called FACTS. I've delivered this lecture before: there are no facts in genealogy. There is evidence which leads us to make assertions and come to conclusions. Very little is ever proven if you go back in time far enough to make genealogy worth the time it takes to enter data. Data are not facts. One problem is that events and attributes have a fuzzy delineation, so some genieware designers just call them "facts" in order to avoid distinguishing them from each other. But let me see if I can enter some factoids, at least.
The input table has three columns: Facts, Descr, and N.
I can guess what Descr means. "N" might mean Note? Aren't notes long enough to deserve a fully-spelled-out column heading so I don't have to guess what to do? The bright interface is getting to me. Clicking in the table does nothing. This is discouraging. Oh look, there's a "+" button. Why can't I just click into or tab into the table and start typing? All these extra mouse clickings are annoying. Well nothing worked.
Below this table which will apparently remain empty, there's a table with a column labeled Events and a column labeled Year. The table is for truncated data with resizable columns. Don't get me started on resizable columns. To the right of that is an input area much larger than the tiny table itself. Why do genieware designers treat the events of a person's life as an afterthought? Here I can enter an occupation, full date, nested place, age, etc. Some of what I enter will display in the tiny table. Then the input area will sit there empty and unused, taking up 2-1/2 times more space than the table where the entered events are (partially, truncatedly) displayed.
In Treebard, the events table is a big deal. I've been working on it on and off for almost four years. It takes up a lot of space. You can read all the words you input to it. The input area and the display area are the same area, because you input data directly into the table where it's displayed. This design feature was inspired by a program called Genbox which you should buy if you can get its creator to sell it to you. It's not perfect but it's the best genieware I've found, by far. Of course, Treebard's similar events table is a big improvement over the Genbox event table that helped to inspire it, a big improvement in many ways.
With an occupation entered, I can see that the tiny table on the left is really a contents listing thing I can click on to show the stuff I entered. The tiny table shows "occ" for occupation, "1996" instead of the whole date, and when you click or arrow into a row in the tiny table, the input area becomes a display area for the data I had actually entered. For ONE event at a time. This is not how you tell a story. In Genbox and in Treebard, a table full of events, one row for each event, stretches across a great big area of screen space. Sorted by date, it tells the story of a human being's life.
Looking for a tab dedicated to places, I find a second tab dedicated to advertising Google Maps or some other mapping website, at the expense of my internet connection. I must have given FaceLift permission to use my internet connection, but how do I revoke it? I haven't paid for FaceLift yet, but they're not gonna pay for my internet connection, so why are they using it to advertise some mapping website? Sorry for the rant, but I'm going blind. There's apparently no way to make this interface a dark color.
Believe it or not, FaceLift is one of the better programs I've found. I don't know why I say that. Something about it is less annoying than the other geniewares. I'll let you know if I figure out what it is. But first, I have to see what havoc is wreaked if I try to change the font size to something I can see without tipping my head to a certain angle, blinking several times, and trying to relax the muscles in my face so my eyes will focus against the glare of a whitish background and size 10 fonts.
I change the font size to 14 and nothing (nothing) changes.
I close the tree and re-open it. No change.
I close the whole program and re-open it. Nope. Size 10 fonts, as declared standard by Microsoft back in the dark ages of Windows. I mean the first dark ages of Windows.
Goodbye FaceLift, I barely seen ya.