"Lord Genie" review
Oct 16, 2021 7:46:42 GMT -8
Post by Uncle Buddy on Oct 16, 2021 7:46:42 GMT -8
I've just opened a real program which I'll fictitiously call "Lord Genie" after reading a scathing review of it on Tamura Jones' blog. This well known program which its creator touts as the best program available is quite horrible, according to Mr. Jones, especially the user interface. Well, taking critical note of lousy user experience is my area. The main purpose of Treebard GPS is to prove that genieware interfaces don't have to be annoying, grotesque, useless, confusing, unintuitive or hard to learn.
A secondary goal of mine is to show that genealogists can write their own code. I'm a little intimidated after reading Mr. Jones' blog, because there is so much that other programs attempt instead of staying focused on getting the basics right, so much utter fluff that genieware doesn't need to do. I'm not gonna try to keep up with other genieware creators' energy-wasting stabs at their wrong-headed goal of being all things to all people: it's just plain featuritis. So this raises the fear in me that critics will say that Treebard is just "Genieware Lite", but I have to remind myself that most genealogists (the sane ones) aren't actually looking for a program that creates websites, edits photos, writes books, and cooks breakfast, because plenty of applications exist which already do these things. For example, the application of good old-fashioned elbow grease. What if the aspiring book writer doesn't mind doing some of the work without smarty-pants software pretending to replace the effort needed to do it right. What the world is lacking is a genieware that handles the details of genealogy well and is still easy to learn and use. And stops pretending to be omnipotent.
So anyhow, I've just opened Lord Genie and will proceed to reflect upon its effect on me. After reading Mr. Jones' review, I expect this experience to help motivate me to keep going with Treebard GPS. And the purpose of Treebard GPS is to show the way to geeky programmer types who apparently don't know what people like about genealogy. Hint: our ancestors and their stories are not data.
Bravely venturing to open Lord Genie...
When I open an application, I don't want to see an extra dialog with "Kwik Tips" or anything of the sort. This sort of thing can generally be turned off, but why does it even exist? It exists because learning the program is unintuitive, and instead of fixing the interface, the programmer adds dialogs explaining how to work around his delusions of genius. And the next programmer who hits me with the phrase "strongly encourage..." had better be prepared for a surprise visit, because it would give me great pleasure to seek that person out and strongly encourage him to not say anything to me from the platform of his app that he wouldn't say to my face. Does anyone talk that way? Anyone? Not that I mind condescending geeky twits who have no rapport with actual human beings, hells bells, I'm of that breed myself, and I'm not even a very good geek. But that doesn't keep me from having a reaction to this tendency in other condescending geekoids.
As expected, the interface opens with a bright white background, tiny letters, and a whole bunch of stuff crammed into a small area. By a "bunch of stuff" I mean three separate panes which appear to be separate dialogs that could be turned off one-by-one. And which appear to be arrangable about the screen, which is a sign that the creator of the app didn't design an interface but has left that up to the user. As if visual appeal as a phenomenon either doesn't exist or isn't worth pursuing.
Well over half of the text strings in the three panes are highlighted, I wonder what that means? Hmmm... Well it looks like all the names are highlighted. Possibly because we seem to have names and places in the same column? Yup, a column is actually headed "Name/Place". Why would names and places be in the same column? Once again, this is because of lack of design, the inability to make a decision, to separate X from Y. There's another column headed "Value" and one headed "Type", neither of which are self-explanatory. The cryptic values and types in the columns also do nothing to explain what this information refers to, nor why it's so important that it needs to be at the very top of everything, the first thing I see. Do programmers not understand that genealogy is about people, not about data?
I'm looking at the sample tree that comes with Lord Genie. The data in the opening screen is (I'm guessing) all about the person listed at the top of the page in a place where both the column heading and the row heading are "Name". This small table has rows for "Name" (i.e. current person?), Father, and Mother. The table below this appears to be an events table where we see two birth events, a practice that Treebard is trying to put an end to. People are not born twice. Conflicting sources do not make two events, they are two assertions about one event. Genieware has completely neglected the unit of genealogy called "assertion".
Intermixed into the events table there seem to be extra names or something. Something marked "Name-Marr", with what might be a surname in grotesque 20th century ALL CAPS in the Name/Place column. But this possible surname is not highlighted like every other name on the screen, so who knows? I can guess though, because the same surname is given in the same column with the same date and this time the Type column says "Marriage". So basically this redundant bit of info needs its own row and needs to be seen so badly that it can't be off in a Names table somewhere? Why should names and places be mixed into the same column? Why would names and events be mixed into the same table? Lack of design.
The last two columns in this table are headed "M" and "S". Right... They are optionally check-marked. I clicked on one of the checkmarks, after right-clicking to see if a context help menu might be available to tell me what this column was for. Nope. No context help, no tooltips if I hover, it's just "M" and "S". When I clicked on the checkmark, three grayed-out buttons appeared to become active. They're labeled Edit, Delete, and Primary. That doesn't help me to understand what "M" and "S" mean.
To the right of this "Details" pane or dialog are two more panes or dialogs: Children and Siblings. Now, about the word "details". Geeks do not understand, and need to be taught, that only they love details. Most people hate that word. In this case it means "Catch-All". Then over in the two panes on the right, we have my favorite thing to complain about: resizable columns that can't be read unless one feels like resizing those columns. Lack of design. Like the interior decorator who crams too much furniture into one room, puts wheels on everything, and instructs the client (or strongly encourages him) to roll the sofa aside in order to get to the chair. This is not interior design. It's interior ruination.
Here we have still more mystery columns, this time with no heading at all. Well that's not much worse than "M" and "S", so who's complaining? Some rows in some columns contain checkmarks, some contain arrows. I'm afraid to click them, what if it melts my computer? If I had no computer, I'd be forced to read those neglected books on my shelf.
Rather than clicking mystery columns and resizing illegible columns, I'll search for a way to get the blinding white light out of my face. I'm pretty sure of what I'll find, but let's give it a shot anyway.
I click the menu item File > Preferences and instead of getting a tabbed layout where I can seek out the option I want to use, up comes a dialog that offers to hobble me by making me choose whether I want to enter data like a beginner or like an expert. So there are two versions of this interface? Wouldn't the designer's time have been better spent creating one usable, intuitive interface instead of two icky ones?
Reading the excessive verbiage (pedantism) on the dialog, it looks like I have to make a choice in order to proceed. Hells bells, boys and girls, I was looking for a way to change font sizes and background colors. What kind of GUI purgatory will I end up in if I choose to corral myself into a "Beginner" or "Advanced" category? It's not like there's a button that allows me to skip this step, so maybe this is a Wizard instead of a proper interface that actually lets me see what all my options are? Aren't wizards themselves supposed to be optional?
I'll go ahead and click "Advanced", hoping this is not the first of eight screens that I'll have to click through before getting to an overall sighting of the available program options. Sure enough, what opens up is not a Preferences menu but another dang Kwik Tip with many words on it. You know, I have some good books on my shelf that I don't have time to read, so why should I spend my precious time on earth drooling over the immortal words of some pedantic instructo-bot who can't stop instructing, instructing, because he hasn't bothered to design an interface whose function is obvious? No, I'm not gonna read this one, I'll just click Close and hope my computer doesn't melt.
And sure enough, instead of getting off the soapbox, this app designer has decided to show me still another unwanted set of choices (one of them condescendingly marked "Recommended"). This time it's about whether or not I want to see Kwik Tips, ever, at all. Well I would want to see them if they could read my mind and show me the right thing at the right time. The nit-picking but not quite omniscient mind of the program designer has split my choice into not two, but three possible ways to go. Do I have to study this guy's mind? Is there any way to get to the genealogy? Or at least the Preferences screen?
Since this (no longer updated or maintained?) program still has a 30-day free window for me to get my fill of the program without masochistically paying for it, I'll just say Yes to the superfluous dialog and hopefully not regret it forever. Or for 30 days. Or for 30 minutes, if I can take it that much longer. Will this dialog of unwanted choices open every time I try to close a Kwik Tip?
Finally an Options menu appears and there's not one, but two "Colors" options, which is not a good sign. It means more hairsplitting, instead of actually giving me the option to get rid of the glaring white screen, make the fonts bigger, and in general make the program visible to me since I will go blind in a few minutes if forced to stare at a white computer screen. Do you like it when someone shines a flashlight into your eyes? If you're old and myopic like me, you know the right answer to that question.
It looks a lot like there will be no way to get rid of the white background. It's hard to say, because the labels on the options when I click "Colors" were made to be understood by the guy who wrote the program, not the poor fella trying to use it. But I will try to change the colors and see what actually changes. Don't hold your breath.
Wow! Look at the beautiful dark backgrounds! Unfortunately however, it looks like the new font sizes I tried to request didn't come through. But it's hard to tell, because the font color doesn't change to a light color when I change the background to a dark color, unless there's some trick to it that I'm too dense to imagine into existence.
In desperation, I reopen the Preferences screen. I can't read the menu anymore since it's black letters on a dark blue background, but if I use the arrow keys, the menu items come into focus one at a time. When I stumble upon the Colors screen, the buttons are still white (did I ask for white buttons?) and I see there is a "Scheme" label followed by a "Load..." button. I click that and a file thingy opens up so I choose Indian Pottery theme, expecting to find my 30-days-free copy of Lord Genie magically transformed into a thing of beauty, easy on the eyes, and...
But no. This option gets only an error. Nothing happens at all. Well at least it didn't melt my computer.
Once again in desperation I choose non-white colors that will still allow my black (still tiny) letters to be read. Not that I'm gonna read 10-point fonts for very long--certainly not for 30 days. But I do want to see how long it will take to add a new person to this database. For some reason I think it should be easy. One can always hope.
With the text now sort-of visible on somewhat darkish backgrounds, I click a menu icon labeled Add Person and a whole table opens up with several more cryptically-labeled columns. It looks like instead of just adding a person I can make my new person a relative or non-relative of the person already featured on the screen. What if I try to give this person another mother? That should be fun.
So I create a mother for the person on the screen, who already has a mother, and I'm informed by a popup dialog that the surname "Doe" doesn't yet exist in the database.
So what? Why are they telling me this?
I give the program permission to do what I already told it to do and up comes another dialog, with the warning, "The new tag(s) have no citation. Continue anyway?"
Huh? What the heck does that mean? Does anyone care what a tag is? I can't imagine what "tags" have to do with people, or even with genealogy. I'll just say "Yes" (even though apparently "No" is more strongly encouraged, but I don't know why since I don't know what a tag is).
What do you think happened when I gave the person a new mother named Jane Doe? The events-plus table now has an item in the Type column labeled "Mother-Bio" but the table at the top still has the original mother listed. Please tell me that all mothers, sisters, and brothers are not going to be called "mother-bio", "sister-bio" and "brother-bio". Don't biological kin deserve some sort of default status? How about "mother", "sister", and "brother"?
To see if there's any way to reconcile this paradox, I click off of the Person Tab into the Family Tab. Hey, guess what? There are those big fonts I requested! But the line spacing hasn't increased to show the big letters and the column widths haven't increased. Every word on the table is illegible. Well not completely. I see the top halves of the letters. I can read it well enough to see that Jane Doe is not mentioned at all.
I just wanted to do something with the thousands of sources I've compiled on the dozens of family trees that I've researched. I have not found a genealogy software that is worth the effort, smacking of good taste, well-designed, and trustworthy. When a designer approaches interface creation with this much lack of rapport for his users, it does not encourage me to just get used to the inevitable work-arounds so that I can use his app to try and input thousands of research findings in the hope that my work will not be destroyed by trying to store it somewhere. I'll just have to write my own genieware. Even if I never finish, I'll be creating something that someone else can finish, and it will be better than wasting my time.
So this is version seven of Lord Genie?
A secondary goal of mine is to show that genealogists can write their own code. I'm a little intimidated after reading Mr. Jones' blog, because there is so much that other programs attempt instead of staying focused on getting the basics right, so much utter fluff that genieware doesn't need to do. I'm not gonna try to keep up with other genieware creators' energy-wasting stabs at their wrong-headed goal of being all things to all people: it's just plain featuritis. So this raises the fear in me that critics will say that Treebard is just "Genieware Lite", but I have to remind myself that most genealogists (the sane ones) aren't actually looking for a program that creates websites, edits photos, writes books, and cooks breakfast, because plenty of applications exist which already do these things. For example, the application of good old-fashioned elbow grease. What if the aspiring book writer doesn't mind doing some of the work without smarty-pants software pretending to replace the effort needed to do it right. What the world is lacking is a genieware that handles the details of genealogy well and is still easy to learn and use. And stops pretending to be omnipotent.
So anyhow, I've just opened Lord Genie and will proceed to reflect upon its effect on me. After reading Mr. Jones' review, I expect this experience to help motivate me to keep going with Treebard GPS. And the purpose of Treebard GPS is to show the way to geeky programmer types who apparently don't know what people like about genealogy. Hint: our ancestors and their stories are not data.
Bravely venturing to open Lord Genie...
When I open an application, I don't want to see an extra dialog with "Kwik Tips" or anything of the sort. This sort of thing can generally be turned off, but why does it even exist? It exists because learning the program is unintuitive, and instead of fixing the interface, the programmer adds dialogs explaining how to work around his delusions of genius. And the next programmer who hits me with the phrase "strongly encourage..." had better be prepared for a surprise visit, because it would give me great pleasure to seek that person out and strongly encourage him to not say anything to me from the platform of his app that he wouldn't say to my face. Does anyone talk that way? Anyone? Not that I mind condescending geeky twits who have no rapport with actual human beings, hells bells, I'm of that breed myself, and I'm not even a very good geek. But that doesn't keep me from having a reaction to this tendency in other condescending geekoids.
As expected, the interface opens with a bright white background, tiny letters, and a whole bunch of stuff crammed into a small area. By a "bunch of stuff" I mean three separate panes which appear to be separate dialogs that could be turned off one-by-one. And which appear to be arrangable about the screen, which is a sign that the creator of the app didn't design an interface but has left that up to the user. As if visual appeal as a phenomenon either doesn't exist or isn't worth pursuing.
Well over half of the text strings in the three panes are highlighted, I wonder what that means? Hmmm... Well it looks like all the names are highlighted. Possibly because we seem to have names and places in the same column? Yup, a column is actually headed "Name/Place". Why would names and places be in the same column? Once again, this is because of lack of design, the inability to make a decision, to separate X from Y. There's another column headed "Value" and one headed "Type", neither of which are self-explanatory. The cryptic values and types in the columns also do nothing to explain what this information refers to, nor why it's so important that it needs to be at the very top of everything, the first thing I see. Do programmers not understand that genealogy is about people, not about data?
I'm looking at the sample tree that comes with Lord Genie. The data in the opening screen is (I'm guessing) all about the person listed at the top of the page in a place where both the column heading and the row heading are "Name". This small table has rows for "Name" (i.e. current person?), Father, and Mother. The table below this appears to be an events table where we see two birth events, a practice that Treebard is trying to put an end to. People are not born twice. Conflicting sources do not make two events, they are two assertions about one event. Genieware has completely neglected the unit of genealogy called "assertion".
Intermixed into the events table there seem to be extra names or something. Something marked "Name-Marr", with what might be a surname in grotesque 20th century ALL CAPS in the Name/Place column. But this possible surname is not highlighted like every other name on the screen, so who knows? I can guess though, because the same surname is given in the same column with the same date and this time the Type column says "Marriage". So basically this redundant bit of info needs its own row and needs to be seen so badly that it can't be off in a Names table somewhere? Why should names and places be mixed into the same column? Why would names and events be mixed into the same table? Lack of design.
The last two columns in this table are headed "M" and "S". Right... They are optionally check-marked. I clicked on one of the checkmarks, after right-clicking to see if a context help menu might be available to tell me what this column was for. Nope. No context help, no tooltips if I hover, it's just "M" and "S". When I clicked on the checkmark, three grayed-out buttons appeared to become active. They're labeled Edit, Delete, and Primary. That doesn't help me to understand what "M" and "S" mean.
To the right of this "Details" pane or dialog are two more panes or dialogs: Children and Siblings. Now, about the word "details". Geeks do not understand, and need to be taught, that only they love details. Most people hate that word. In this case it means "Catch-All". Then over in the two panes on the right, we have my favorite thing to complain about: resizable columns that can't be read unless one feels like resizing those columns. Lack of design. Like the interior decorator who crams too much furniture into one room, puts wheels on everything, and instructs the client (or strongly encourages him) to roll the sofa aside in order to get to the chair. This is not interior design. It's interior ruination.
Here we have still more mystery columns, this time with no heading at all. Well that's not much worse than "M" and "S", so who's complaining? Some rows in some columns contain checkmarks, some contain arrows. I'm afraid to click them, what if it melts my computer? If I had no computer, I'd be forced to read those neglected books on my shelf.
Rather than clicking mystery columns and resizing illegible columns, I'll search for a way to get the blinding white light out of my face. I'm pretty sure of what I'll find, but let's give it a shot anyway.
I click the menu item File > Preferences and instead of getting a tabbed layout where I can seek out the option I want to use, up comes a dialog that offers to hobble me by making me choose whether I want to enter data like a beginner or like an expert. So there are two versions of this interface? Wouldn't the designer's time have been better spent creating one usable, intuitive interface instead of two icky ones?
Reading the excessive verbiage (pedantism) on the dialog, it looks like I have to make a choice in order to proceed. Hells bells, boys and girls, I was looking for a way to change font sizes and background colors. What kind of GUI purgatory will I end up in if I choose to corral myself into a "Beginner" or "Advanced" category? It's not like there's a button that allows me to skip this step, so maybe this is a Wizard instead of a proper interface that actually lets me see what all my options are? Aren't wizards themselves supposed to be optional?
I'll go ahead and click "Advanced", hoping this is not the first of eight screens that I'll have to click through before getting to an overall sighting of the available program options. Sure enough, what opens up is not a Preferences menu but another dang Kwik Tip with many words on it. You know, I have some good books on my shelf that I don't have time to read, so why should I spend my precious time on earth drooling over the immortal words of some pedantic instructo-bot who can't stop instructing, instructing, because he hasn't bothered to design an interface whose function is obvious? No, I'm not gonna read this one, I'll just click Close and hope my computer doesn't melt.
And sure enough, instead of getting off the soapbox, this app designer has decided to show me still another unwanted set of choices (one of them condescendingly marked "Recommended"). This time it's about whether or not I want to see Kwik Tips, ever, at all. Well I would want to see them if they could read my mind and show me the right thing at the right time. The nit-picking but not quite omniscient mind of the program designer has split my choice into not two, but three possible ways to go. Do I have to study this guy's mind? Is there any way to get to the genealogy? Or at least the Preferences screen?
Since this (no longer updated or maintained?) program still has a 30-day free window for me to get my fill of the program without masochistically paying for it, I'll just say Yes to the superfluous dialog and hopefully not regret it forever. Or for 30 days. Or for 30 minutes, if I can take it that much longer. Will this dialog of unwanted choices open every time I try to close a Kwik Tip?
Finally an Options menu appears and there's not one, but two "Colors" options, which is not a good sign. It means more hairsplitting, instead of actually giving me the option to get rid of the glaring white screen, make the fonts bigger, and in general make the program visible to me since I will go blind in a few minutes if forced to stare at a white computer screen. Do you like it when someone shines a flashlight into your eyes? If you're old and myopic like me, you know the right answer to that question.
It looks a lot like there will be no way to get rid of the white background. It's hard to say, because the labels on the options when I click "Colors" were made to be understood by the guy who wrote the program, not the poor fella trying to use it. But I will try to change the colors and see what actually changes. Don't hold your breath.
Wow! Look at the beautiful dark backgrounds! Unfortunately however, it looks like the new font sizes I tried to request didn't come through. But it's hard to tell, because the font color doesn't change to a light color when I change the background to a dark color, unless there's some trick to it that I'm too dense to imagine into existence.
In desperation, I reopen the Preferences screen. I can't read the menu anymore since it's black letters on a dark blue background, but if I use the arrow keys, the menu items come into focus one at a time. When I stumble upon the Colors screen, the buttons are still white (did I ask for white buttons?) and I see there is a "Scheme" label followed by a "Load..." button. I click that and a file thingy opens up so I choose Indian Pottery theme, expecting to find my 30-days-free copy of Lord Genie magically transformed into a thing of beauty, easy on the eyes, and...
But no. This option gets only an error. Nothing happens at all. Well at least it didn't melt my computer.
Once again in desperation I choose non-white colors that will still allow my black (still tiny) letters to be read. Not that I'm gonna read 10-point fonts for very long--certainly not for 30 days. But I do want to see how long it will take to add a new person to this database. For some reason I think it should be easy. One can always hope.
With the text now sort-of visible on somewhat darkish backgrounds, I click a menu icon labeled Add Person and a whole table opens up with several more cryptically-labeled columns. It looks like instead of just adding a person I can make my new person a relative or non-relative of the person already featured on the screen. What if I try to give this person another mother? That should be fun.
So I create a mother for the person on the screen, who already has a mother, and I'm informed by a popup dialog that the surname "Doe" doesn't yet exist in the database.
So what? Why are they telling me this?
I give the program permission to do what I already told it to do and up comes another dialog, with the warning, "The new tag(s) have no citation. Continue anyway?"
Huh? What the heck does that mean? Does anyone care what a tag is? I can't imagine what "tags" have to do with people, or even with genealogy. I'll just say "Yes" (even though apparently "No" is more strongly encouraged, but I don't know why since I don't know what a tag is).
What do you think happened when I gave the person a new mother named Jane Doe? The events-plus table now has an item in the Type column labeled "Mother-Bio" but the table at the top still has the original mother listed. Please tell me that all mothers, sisters, and brothers are not going to be called "mother-bio", "sister-bio" and "brother-bio". Don't biological kin deserve some sort of default status? How about "mother", "sister", and "brother"?
To see if there's any way to reconcile this paradox, I click off of the Person Tab into the Family Tab. Hey, guess what? There are those big fonts I requested! But the line spacing hasn't increased to show the big letters and the column widths haven't increased. Every word on the table is illegible. Well not completely. I see the top halves of the letters. I can read it well enough to see that Jane Doe is not mentioned at all.
I just wanted to do something with the thousands of sources I've compiled on the dozens of family trees that I've researched. I have not found a genealogy software that is worth the effort, smacking of good taste, well-designed, and trustworthy. When a designer approaches interface creation with this much lack of rapport for his users, it does not encourage me to just get used to the inevitable work-arounds so that I can use his app to try and input thousands of research findings in the hope that my work will not be destroyed by trying to store it somewhere. I'll just have to write my own genieware. Even if I never finish, I'll be creating something that someone else can finish, and it will be better than wasting my time.
So this is version seven of Lord Genie?