Legacy review
Mar 18, 2022 20:07:08 GMT -8
Post by Uncle Buddy on Mar 18, 2022 20:07:08 GMT -8
Legacy_9.0_review
I'm going to break with a personal tradition and review Legacy 9.0 by its real name. I'm encouraged to do this since I find some things to like about the program upon first opening it. As usual I'm not going to dive too deeply into the innards but focus mainly on the GUI.
First, here are some things I immediately dislike about the program, and I'll switch to the good stuff as quickly as possible. I'm looking at the free Standard Version which appears to allow you to do some genealogy indefinitely while shutting you out of deluxe features if you don't pay for the premium version. I'll just review the parts I can see and try to be understanding about the desire of software developers to get paid. However, there's a better way to let someone decide whether they like your program or not, and that is to let them use the whole program, either for a limited time or else by adding a limited number of people to the tree. If I were trying to sell a genieware, here's how I'd do it. I'd give the user full access to full functionality of a sample database and let them play with it as much as they want. They would not be able to create their own database or delete more than 50 people from the sample database, and that would prevent non-paying users from converting the sample tree to their own.
But I'm not trying to sell an app so I won't dwell on how that should be done.
I notice what looks like links to the big boys of online genealogy such as Find-a-Grave. I don't like that. Genealogy is not about big online corporations or connecting to anything but ancestors. That's why Treebard lets you use your browser to connect to the internet, your graphics program to manipulate images, your file manager to store media, etc. That's why the creator of Treebard has time to create Treebard. Attempting to emulate the featuritis that sets commercial software apart from doable independent projects would make my independent project undoable. Treebard might someday receive one or more donations from people who like the project, but there is no advertising or spamming on any of my sites. Here on Legacy we have permanent buttons that advertise the big corporations every time you look at the GUI. Besides reeking of spam, this sort of thing occupies prime real estate on a monitor that is only so large. And visual noise is unpleasant, repellant and obnoxious. Like Legacy's website, which is not about genealogy, but about Buy! Buy! Buy!
The second thing I don't like about Legacy is a permanent input for "Chr" right under the input that says "Born". Nothing against Christians, but does genieware have to be christianity-centric? Nor do I want to see LDS or DNA mentioned in genieware. That's just a personal preference of mine. We want to be gender-neutral but we don't care to be religion- and science-neutral? In Treebard, Mormons (for example) can create any custom events and other types to flesh out the program as desired. The problem with genieware that is FOR SALE is that it tends to market itself to such a degree that the genealogy becomes a veneer on the face of spam. Genieware should be free, and if it were free, GEDCOM would have been replaced by something better a long time ago: a genieware with many contributing developers that everyone would be happy to use and share with each other. As in, "Forget GEDCOM, just share the whole program".
And GUI-wise (that means "aesthetically speaking"), abbreviations are ugly. In fact, assuming that "Chr" means something to everybody who sees it... well, that's kinda ugly too.
There's a fairly useful table of events that can be accessed for each person by clicking on that person's special area on the Family tab. (Apparently couples and families are considered more primarily elemental to genealogy than individuals, but oh well.) The events are ordered by date, as they should be. The programmer simplified his task by putting birth, christening, death and burial up above the table in permanent positions, instead of putting them in the events table. The last four columns in the table have tiny icons for headings instead of words. Normally I'd complain about this, but Legacy provides tooltips so people like me who don't like tiny icons can find out what the columns are for. One of them is kinda unique: "Event is shared with others." Not a bad idea. One of the icons is for sources. Clicking the icon opens a useful-looking dialog.
What I don't like about the events table is the horrible combining of "Desc/Place/Notes" into a single column. This is inexcusably ugly. In other places on the GUI, place names display well, you can actually read all the way to the end of "Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota, United States" with room to spare. So why smoosh three separate data items together on the all-important events table? How did such a horrible feature end up in version 9? The data doesn't fit in a table cell, so a tooltip appears and then you have to read a smooshed-together, overly long tooltip. How silly. Tooltips need to be short and easy to read. Notes need to be in a separate dialog or a separate tab. Notes of any length should be allowed, complete with paragraph breaks. Treebard even expects the user to give each note a title. Yes, a unique title. This allows a single note to be linked to many elements, so notes don't have to be copy/pasted from person to person in the tree. "Desc" obviously means "description", so what's the difference between Notes and Descriptions? In Treebard we have a field called "Particulars" for very short notes, with its own dedicated column in the events table. In another column of the same row we have a button that can be pressed to open the Notes dialog for that event. The appearance of the button changes depending on whether any notes have already been entered for that event.
The dialog that opens with an individual's events table is called "Individual's Information". So it's good that there is in fact some isolation of an individual into his own area. When I resized this dialog manually, the font got bigger. Now I'm starting to like this program. Speaking of basic considerations like appearance, several themes are available and there are no bright white glaring areas on the theme I chose. Another point in Legacy's favor. I'd prefer a truly dark theme, but I don't think there is one. I changed themes a few times, but this is tedious because instead of providing a preview and/or swatch area, I have to guess by the name of the theme whether or not I might like it, then the whole options dialog closes and I have to find it again to try another theme. There's also an option for changing colors, but this feature is pure gobble-de-goop. Maybe it works great, but I'm not willing to try it, because it starts talking about "tags", whatever those are, instead of showing me color swatches and making it simple.
A common defect of many programs that do offer customizable colors is that there are too many options. A good color scheme only needs a few different colors, and most users don't want to spend more than a minute or two changing colors. In Treebard, many themes both light and dark are available, it takes a few seconds to create a new one, all choices are previewed in the dialog so many themes can be tried, created, deleted and applied in a few minutes. There are only a few colors in a Treebard theme, so Treebard is uniquely simple and fun to use, when it comes to customizing colors. Best of all, Treebard is in the public domain, so if Legacy or anyone else wants to rip off my design and use it, well who really cares? You can't take it with you, know what I mean? I assume that means I can't take it with me, either.
The Family tab appears to be Legacy's main useful tab, although the first tab is "Legacy Home" which is basically a place for the company to advertise itself. Two or three tabs are unavailable or covered by advertising since I didn't buy the premium version. The Family tab is where it's at.
This tab is couple-centric, showing a man and wife and their children. What I like about it is that there is only one image for each member of the couple, not a bunch of tiny unseeable thumbnails for all 15 children like some of the uglier popular programs have. The two pictures are too small, but I've seen worse. At least you can click the thumbnail to open a larger version. But the dialog that opens is grotesquely labeled "QuickLook" instead of something normal (non-proprietary-sounding) such as "Gallery". Is there another gallery someplace called "SlowLook"? What if there's more than one image available for a person? The main person in the sample tree should have several photos attached so I don't have to wonder about these things.
Above the "Husband" area on the left is a label "Self", and above the "Wife" area on the right is a label "Wife". So there is a repetition of "Wife"--apparently a wife is just a wife--but the husband also has a self. Is there a way to switch the wife to the left so she can have a self too? I can't imagine how that might be done. This is why genieware should revolve around individuals, using the current person model, instead of couples and families. We should not have to assume that a man and woman are husband and wife in order to view their relationship and children. This is dishonest and wrong. Marriage is only one event in genealogy, but the marriage of the husband and wife in Legacy is shown as the only event worth mentioning on the Family table. Events should only be mentioned in the events table. What if the couple got married twice? I've researched a man who had two identities throughout his life. He enlisted in the army twice and got married twice, to the same woman, once under each name. (Well proven. I couldn't make this stuff up. Real people are weirder than fiction.) How would Legacy deal with this? Let me attempt to enter something like this. Wish me luck.
First, how to enter a new person? Easy, but why is Legacy harassing me with an R-U-Sure dialog as to whether or not the surname is correct? Now the second person. Harassed again for entering a new surname.
By the way, while I'm thinking about it, let me complain about the labels on the Husband and Wife areas. On the left, we have "Born", "Chr", "Died", "BuriedMale", "DthCau". I already whined about "Chr" which also appears somewhere else to remind me that I'm of the wrong religion, but "BuriedMale"? What could possibly be the reason for that wording, not to mention the wrongness of a MadeUpWord right where I have to see it every time I look at the interface. But worse: "DthCau".
DthCau?
Oh! I get it! I had to think about it six times, but I finally realized that this must mean "Cause of Death". Well excuse me for wanting such an event to be treated with considerable more tact and dignity instead of a MadeUpAbbrevWord. And it doesn't belong By Itself on the main display, it belongs in the events table, where it can be compared to the other events of Sid's life. For example, if Sid Grapple had a distinguished military career and then became a successful industrialist, had two large happy families and then committed suicide because he was in so much pain from cancer and an old war wound... do I want the cause of death--suicide--to be, 1) omitted because it's delicate, 2) trumpeted on the front page, or 3) shown in the context of his other life events? Obviously the correct answer is #3.
A GUI that allows expediency to trump clarity and beauty is grotesque.
And yet, Legacy is less groteque than most of the genieware I've tried to play with.
Now back to our project: What happens if Charles Denver and Stella Moonstone get married to each other twice? Can Legacy handle the truth?
One can always hope.
Legacy will let me add a Find-a-Grave ID or FamilySearch.org ID to a person's page, but adding a marriage event the way I want to do it is not proving that easy. I clicked the person area for Charles and his events table opened up. I was able to add a marriage license but there was no marriage event available. This is because marriage is a couple event, I assume, so I'll have to find the right place to add a couple event. But why are events such as marriage banns and marriage licenses being treated as individual events? I had to add Stella as a role person to the marriage license event (hurray for Legacy--they have role people) but for the sake of symmetry, it seems like all couple events should work the same. And in spite of adding Stella as a person who shared the marriage license event, the event did not appear on Stella's events table. Because it was an individual event, and she was just a role person, not a member of a couple, her role in the event only appears in the Roles column of Charles' events table.
In desperation I look to the single-row Marriage event area between the couple area and the children area. I didn't want to do this because I suspect there will be only room for one marriage event here. Hells bells, boys and girls, two people remarry each other all the time. Ambivalence is part of the human condition.
I click the Marriage Events button and a dialog opens. I give the marriage a date and close the dialog. The marriage appears in the one-line Marriage area on the Family tab. Without much hope, I open the Marriage Events dialog again. There's no way, as far as I can tell, to add a second marriage of the same couple so that it gets equal treatment to the first marriage. I try an event called "alt marriage" but since there's no such event as "alt marriage" in real life, I assume that Legacy is just making stuff up again, in lieu of bothering to code reality into their database and GUI. As I feared, the alt marriage doesn't appear in the so-called marriage section of Charles and Stella's family area.
So I like some things about Legacy, even though it doesn't actually make it possible to enter unordinary situations, to view all partners and children at once, to treat all couple events symmetrically... but I've seen worse.
I don't think I can use this software for some of the family situations I've encountered in my research.
I'm going to break with a personal tradition and review Legacy 9.0 by its real name. I'm encouraged to do this since I find some things to like about the program upon first opening it. As usual I'm not going to dive too deeply into the innards but focus mainly on the GUI.
First, here are some things I immediately dislike about the program, and I'll switch to the good stuff as quickly as possible. I'm looking at the free Standard Version which appears to allow you to do some genealogy indefinitely while shutting you out of deluxe features if you don't pay for the premium version. I'll just review the parts I can see and try to be understanding about the desire of software developers to get paid. However, there's a better way to let someone decide whether they like your program or not, and that is to let them use the whole program, either for a limited time or else by adding a limited number of people to the tree. If I were trying to sell a genieware, here's how I'd do it. I'd give the user full access to full functionality of a sample database and let them play with it as much as they want. They would not be able to create their own database or delete more than 50 people from the sample database, and that would prevent non-paying users from converting the sample tree to their own.
But I'm not trying to sell an app so I won't dwell on how that should be done.
I notice what looks like links to the big boys of online genealogy such as Find-a-Grave. I don't like that. Genealogy is not about big online corporations or connecting to anything but ancestors. That's why Treebard lets you use your browser to connect to the internet, your graphics program to manipulate images, your file manager to store media, etc. That's why the creator of Treebard has time to create Treebard. Attempting to emulate the featuritis that sets commercial software apart from doable independent projects would make my independent project undoable. Treebard might someday receive one or more donations from people who like the project, but there is no advertising or spamming on any of my sites. Here on Legacy we have permanent buttons that advertise the big corporations every time you look at the GUI. Besides reeking of spam, this sort of thing occupies prime real estate on a monitor that is only so large. And visual noise is unpleasant, repellant and obnoxious. Like Legacy's website, which is not about genealogy, but about Buy! Buy! Buy!
The second thing I don't like about Legacy is a permanent input for "Chr" right under the input that says "Born". Nothing against Christians, but does genieware have to be christianity-centric? Nor do I want to see LDS or DNA mentioned in genieware. That's just a personal preference of mine. We want to be gender-neutral but we don't care to be religion- and science-neutral? In Treebard, Mormons (for example) can create any custom events and other types to flesh out the program as desired. The problem with genieware that is FOR SALE is that it tends to market itself to such a degree that the genealogy becomes a veneer on the face of spam. Genieware should be free, and if it were free, GEDCOM would have been replaced by something better a long time ago: a genieware with many contributing developers that everyone would be happy to use and share with each other. As in, "Forget GEDCOM, just share the whole program".
And GUI-wise (that means "aesthetically speaking"), abbreviations are ugly. In fact, assuming that "Chr" means something to everybody who sees it... well, that's kinda ugly too.
There's a fairly useful table of events that can be accessed for each person by clicking on that person's special area on the Family tab. (Apparently couples and families are considered more primarily elemental to genealogy than individuals, but oh well.) The events are ordered by date, as they should be. The programmer simplified his task by putting birth, christening, death and burial up above the table in permanent positions, instead of putting them in the events table. The last four columns in the table have tiny icons for headings instead of words. Normally I'd complain about this, but Legacy provides tooltips so people like me who don't like tiny icons can find out what the columns are for. One of them is kinda unique: "Event is shared with others." Not a bad idea. One of the icons is for sources. Clicking the icon opens a useful-looking dialog.
What I don't like about the events table is the horrible combining of "Desc/Place/Notes" into a single column. This is inexcusably ugly. In other places on the GUI, place names display well, you can actually read all the way to the end of "Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota, United States" with room to spare. So why smoosh three separate data items together on the all-important events table? How did such a horrible feature end up in version 9? The data doesn't fit in a table cell, so a tooltip appears and then you have to read a smooshed-together, overly long tooltip. How silly. Tooltips need to be short and easy to read. Notes need to be in a separate dialog or a separate tab. Notes of any length should be allowed, complete with paragraph breaks. Treebard even expects the user to give each note a title. Yes, a unique title. This allows a single note to be linked to many elements, so notes don't have to be copy/pasted from person to person in the tree. "Desc" obviously means "description", so what's the difference between Notes and Descriptions? In Treebard we have a field called "Particulars" for very short notes, with its own dedicated column in the events table. In another column of the same row we have a button that can be pressed to open the Notes dialog for that event. The appearance of the button changes depending on whether any notes have already been entered for that event.
The dialog that opens with an individual's events table is called "Individual's Information". So it's good that there is in fact some isolation of an individual into his own area. When I resized this dialog manually, the font got bigger. Now I'm starting to like this program. Speaking of basic considerations like appearance, several themes are available and there are no bright white glaring areas on the theme I chose. Another point in Legacy's favor. I'd prefer a truly dark theme, but I don't think there is one. I changed themes a few times, but this is tedious because instead of providing a preview and/or swatch area, I have to guess by the name of the theme whether or not I might like it, then the whole options dialog closes and I have to find it again to try another theme. There's also an option for changing colors, but this feature is pure gobble-de-goop. Maybe it works great, but I'm not willing to try it, because it starts talking about "tags", whatever those are, instead of showing me color swatches and making it simple.
A common defect of many programs that do offer customizable colors is that there are too many options. A good color scheme only needs a few different colors, and most users don't want to spend more than a minute or two changing colors. In Treebard, many themes both light and dark are available, it takes a few seconds to create a new one, all choices are previewed in the dialog so many themes can be tried, created, deleted and applied in a few minutes. There are only a few colors in a Treebard theme, so Treebard is uniquely simple and fun to use, when it comes to customizing colors. Best of all, Treebard is in the public domain, so if Legacy or anyone else wants to rip off my design and use it, well who really cares? You can't take it with you, know what I mean? I assume that means I can't take it with me, either.
The Family tab appears to be Legacy's main useful tab, although the first tab is "Legacy Home" which is basically a place for the company to advertise itself. Two or three tabs are unavailable or covered by advertising since I didn't buy the premium version. The Family tab is where it's at.
This tab is couple-centric, showing a man and wife and their children. What I like about it is that there is only one image for each member of the couple, not a bunch of tiny unseeable thumbnails for all 15 children like some of the uglier popular programs have. The two pictures are too small, but I've seen worse. At least you can click the thumbnail to open a larger version. But the dialog that opens is grotesquely labeled "QuickLook" instead of something normal (non-proprietary-sounding) such as "Gallery". Is there another gallery someplace called "SlowLook"? What if there's more than one image available for a person? The main person in the sample tree should have several photos attached so I don't have to wonder about these things.
Above the "Husband" area on the left is a label "Self", and above the "Wife" area on the right is a label "Wife". So there is a repetition of "Wife"--apparently a wife is just a wife--but the husband also has a self. Is there a way to switch the wife to the left so she can have a self too? I can't imagine how that might be done. This is why genieware should revolve around individuals, using the current person model, instead of couples and families. We should not have to assume that a man and woman are husband and wife in order to view their relationship and children. This is dishonest and wrong. Marriage is only one event in genealogy, but the marriage of the husband and wife in Legacy is shown as the only event worth mentioning on the Family table. Events should only be mentioned in the events table. What if the couple got married twice? I've researched a man who had two identities throughout his life. He enlisted in the army twice and got married twice, to the same woman, once under each name. (Well proven. I couldn't make this stuff up. Real people are weirder than fiction.) How would Legacy deal with this? Let me attempt to enter something like this. Wish me luck.
First, how to enter a new person? Easy, but why is Legacy harassing me with an R-U-Sure dialog as to whether or not the surname is correct? Now the second person. Harassed again for entering a new surname.
By the way, while I'm thinking about it, let me complain about the labels on the Husband and Wife areas. On the left, we have "Born", "Chr", "Died", "BuriedMale", "DthCau". I already whined about "Chr" which also appears somewhere else to remind me that I'm of the wrong religion, but "BuriedMale"? What could possibly be the reason for that wording, not to mention the wrongness of a MadeUpWord right where I have to see it every time I look at the interface. But worse: "DthCau".
DthCau?
Oh! I get it! I had to think about it six times, but I finally realized that this must mean "Cause of Death". Well excuse me for wanting such an event to be treated with considerable more tact and dignity instead of a MadeUpAbbrevWord. And it doesn't belong By Itself on the main display, it belongs in the events table, where it can be compared to the other events of Sid's life. For example, if Sid Grapple had a distinguished military career and then became a successful industrialist, had two large happy families and then committed suicide because he was in so much pain from cancer and an old war wound... do I want the cause of death--suicide--to be, 1) omitted because it's delicate, 2) trumpeted on the front page, or 3) shown in the context of his other life events? Obviously the correct answer is #3.
A GUI that allows expediency to trump clarity and beauty is grotesque.
And yet, Legacy is less groteque than most of the genieware I've tried to play with.
Now back to our project: What happens if Charles Denver and Stella Moonstone get married to each other twice? Can Legacy handle the truth?
One can always hope.
Legacy will let me add a Find-a-Grave ID or FamilySearch.org ID to a person's page, but adding a marriage event the way I want to do it is not proving that easy. I clicked the person area for Charles and his events table opened up. I was able to add a marriage license but there was no marriage event available. This is because marriage is a couple event, I assume, so I'll have to find the right place to add a couple event. But why are events such as marriage banns and marriage licenses being treated as individual events? I had to add Stella as a role person to the marriage license event (hurray for Legacy--they have role people) but for the sake of symmetry, it seems like all couple events should work the same. And in spite of adding Stella as a person who shared the marriage license event, the event did not appear on Stella's events table. Because it was an individual event, and she was just a role person, not a member of a couple, her role in the event only appears in the Roles column of Charles' events table.
In desperation I look to the single-row Marriage event area between the couple area and the children area. I didn't want to do this because I suspect there will be only room for one marriage event here. Hells bells, boys and girls, two people remarry each other all the time. Ambivalence is part of the human condition.
I click the Marriage Events button and a dialog opens. I give the marriage a date and close the dialog. The marriage appears in the one-line Marriage area on the Family tab. Without much hope, I open the Marriage Events dialog again. There's no way, as far as I can tell, to add a second marriage of the same couple so that it gets equal treatment to the first marriage. I try an event called "alt marriage" but since there's no such event as "alt marriage" in real life, I assume that Legacy is just making stuff up again, in lieu of bothering to code reality into their database and GUI. As I feared, the alt marriage doesn't appear in the so-called marriage section of Charles and Stella's family area.
So I like some things about Legacy, even though it doesn't actually make it possible to enter unordinary situations, to view all partners and children at once, to treat all couple events symmetrically... but I've seen worse.
I don't think I can use this software for some of the family situations I've encountered in my research.