easy VHS to DVD for Mac
Company: Roxio
Price: $79.95
http://www.roxio.com

This review could have gone very, very badly, had it not been for Roxio’s excellent support website, and their intrepid PR person, who kept the dialog going when I was ready to wash my hands of the whole thing.

That said, the last thing I wanted to do was start yet another review with: "I really wanted to like this product, but…"

Over the last four months, when I unfortunately had a lot of time on my hands (a victim of the current economic unpleasantness, since resolved, and I am again very happily employed), I decided I needed to regain some storage space in my increasingly cramped townhouse. My collection of several hundred VHS tapes had to go. There were, however, 40-50 titles I wanted to keep and decided to put them on DVD. I had planned on doing this almost two years ago, and found a superior (and expensive!) analog to digital video converter, a Canopus ADVC-300, which I was able to find at a very acceptable price on eBay. I set up my VHS deck in my computer room, connected the video and audio outputs to the ADVC-300 inputs, and sent the output to my dual 2.0 GHz Mac G5 tower’s Firewire port (still running Mac OSX 10.4), and into my copy of iMovie HD (from iLife ’06). Each two hour tape took up 25 GB of disk space in the DV file format. I quickly trimmed unwanted video at the start and end, and inserted chapter markers when the tapes had multiple programs, or if I was putting two 1 hour tapes on a single two hour DVD. These chapter markers directly imported into iDVD where I picked a theme, edited the captions, and burned the final DVD. On my G5 tower, the process of rendering two hours of video before the DVD could be burned, took 4-6 hours.

I repeated this process on my black MacBook with a 2.0 GHz Core2Duo processor, and 3GB of RAM, and everything worked about the same, except the render time took a few hours less, thanks to the speedier processor.

Mostly, I started the recording process just before I went to bed. The next morning, I spent about 30-45 minutes editing the DV file, pushed it to iDVD, and let it render most of the day. By late afternoon, I had another DVD for my briefly empty shelves. It took about 6 weeks to finish the process and I was able to put all the gear away.

Enter MyMac.com’s own John Nemerovski (that’s Nemo to you…) who had heard about my project and thought he had a great review project that was right up my alley. Roxio had just released a Macintosh version of their popular easy VHS to DVD product and was looking for reviewers. In spite of my reputation for writing negative reviews on this site, he gave the job to me anyway…

I received the package, which contained a CD, Getting Started Guide, a Roxio Video Capture USB Device (the brains of this outfit), a short USB to USB extension cable, and a breakout cable with stereo audio, composite video, and S-Video connectors. The CD contained the easy VHS to DVD for Mac software, as well as a (very) limited-feature version of Toast 9.

The Roxio Video Capture USB Device looked suspiciously like something from Elgato, makers of a number of magical video products that bring video content into your Mac via the USB 2.0 port. The big difference, however, is the software. The Elgato-branded device outputs MPEG-4 video, while the Roxio device outputs MPEG-2 files (the same format as commercial DVDs).

I installed the easy VHS to DVD software on my G5 tower, connected the Roxio Video Capture USB Device to the front USB 2.0 port, and connected the audio/video breakout connecting cable to cables from the output of my VHS recorder. When I launched the software, I was immediately directed to Roxio’s website to download and update the software, taking the revision level from version 1.0 to 1.0.1. I went through the easy setup procedure (more on that below), and tried to record some video. At the end of 2 hours, I clicked the stop button, and in the next window, clicked the "Send to iMovie" button. My Mac spent the next two or so hours converting the MPEG-2 file to an intermediate format, but instead of opening the file into iMovie as the instructions suggested they would, I got an error message stating the program could not find the iMovie program. Thinking I’d done something wrong, and tried it again (if I’d been just a little bit smarter, I’d have recorded five minutes of video, and not two hours!), and got the same results. After hunting around the hard drive, I found the MPEG-2 file in the Movies folder at the top level of my home directory. When I opened it in QuickTime Player, I immediately spotted a problem–a massive number of dropped frames. I then checked the size of the file–about 600k–it should have been somewhere around 5.4 GB!

I repeated the above step with my MacBook, and at least got a 5.4 GB MPEG-2 file with no evidence of dropped frames, but still got the iMovie error. I went to the Roxio support boards (excellent, by the way, with very responsive support people) and discovered many others were experiencing the same problem.

Thinking it was at least partly my fault, I bought an additional 2GB of RAM, and went to MegaMacs.com to buy a copy of iLife ’08 (I’m still using MacOS X 10.4–Tiger, which is not compatible with iLife ’09). I found a great deal for an OEM disk for around $40.00.

About a week later, another updater came out, version 1.0.2. Same problems with both issues: dropped frames on my G5, and no automatic opening of iMovie HD. Around this time, I was contacted by Roxio’s intrepid PR guy, wanting to know how things were going. Boy, did I tell him! In a couple of days, I was granted access to a beta version of an upcoming patch. I downloaded and installed it, and viola√°! No more dropped frames (though still no automatic opening of iMovie HD)! It also opened iMovie ’08 (part of the iLife ’08 package), which only served to remind me how evil iMovie ’08 really is. I had forgotten that Apple, in their infinite wisdom, eliminated the ability to enter chapter markers where you want to add them (since restored in iMovie ’09).

Here’s what I found from my research:

1. The easy VHS to DVD software is not compatible with iMovie HD. It will not automatically launch iMovie HD and load the finished movie into it. That function works fine on iMovie ’08, and while I personally didn’t have the chance to see it in action, it probably works equally well with iMovie ’09.

2. The dropped frame problem was almost universal among dual processor G5 users.

3. The beta patch resolved the dropped frame problem on dual-processor G5 machines, and permitted automatic launching of iMovie 08 (and iMovie 09).

4. As a workaround, you can make iMovie HD process the MPEG-2 file by manually dragging it from your Movies folder directly into the iMovie HD application window. It will take fair amount of time for iMovie and QuickTime to convert the file into something that iMovie better understands.

5. Roxio’s web support is very good. Their support staff monitors traffic on the message boards on a very regular basis.

I detailed this story to share my pain with the readers, knowing that most of you would not have had this much patience or persistence, and would likely have demanded your money back, weeks before I finally achieved success. But then again, I am a very tenacious problem solver, and tend not to give up easily.

Okay… Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I can tell you that with the latest beta release software, which will probably be finalized very soon and made available on their support site, it mostly works as advertised (other than the pesky iMovie HD issues).

Here’s how it works:

Launch the easy VHS to DVD for Mac software, and the first screen (above) is displayed. This is where you enter a name for your project, use a pull-down menu to set the approximate length of your video, and set the quality level for the file (standard or high) with another pull-down menu. When you click the Continue button, the next screen is displayed.

You are prompted to test your cabling to ensure your connections are functional. A small video monitor screen shows your video source (if everything is hooked up correctly). Click Continue.

The next screen repeats this process for audio, to ensure the software is decoding the audio from your source. Click Continue.

The overview screen continues previewing video and audio. If you don’t see the picture, or if you can’t hear anything coming out of your Mac’s speaker, you get one final opportunity to go back and fix the problems. Once you are satisfied, start your tape rolling and click the Start Recording button. That same button is used to stop recording when you are ready to do so. If you are operating this product unattended, you might want to click the handy checkbox that automatically stops recording, based upon the recording time you set in the first screen. The benefit of doing this is that you won’t totally fill your hard drive with garbage if you forget to come back and stop recording after an extended period of time. Remember, in the high quality mode, you are eating up disk space at the rate of 2.7GB per hour. In eight hours, you could wind up using over 20GB of disk space.

When you click the Stop Recording button, you are taken to the Finish Up screen, which gives you the option to automatically open Toast and begin the process of recording the video to DVD. The Edit with iMovie button starts a conversion process that takes an MPEG-2 video file into another intermediate file format before importing into iMovie ’08 or iMovie ’09. Send to QuickTime player converts the file to MPEG-4 format before opening the QuickTime player application. Note that the Edit with iMovie and Send to QuickTime Player functions require an additional hour or two to convert the video into compatible file formats.

Quality? In a word, it’s great, at least with VHS tapes that didn’t have a whole lot of quality to begin with. The better the source, the better the converted file will be. At $79.95 it beats the solution I had been using by many hundreds of dollars. This same product can be used nearly anywhere in the world, as it automatically detects and configures itself to output to the analog NTSC or PAL video standards.

This review could have gone a completely different way. Thank goodness it didn’t. After a few weeks of troublesome operation, the last software release solved nearly all the problems I was experiencing. In all likelihood, the copy you buy today will include the latest updates and you should have a wonderful experience with easy VHS to DVD for Mac. As with any video project, the faster your computer’s processor, the more RAM, and the more fast hard disk space, the more you will be satisfied with this and other video processing products. You will quickly learn that working with large video files requires a lot of patience while your computer, and I don’t care how fast it is, plows its way through the file(s).

Even with all the other difficulties, I will say that the software was always stable–it never crashed in the several weeks I used it.

Pros:
Low price brings video conversion to the masses.
Easy setup.
Saving files in MPEG-2 format reduces final rendering time.
Can save in MPEG-2, MPEG-4 formats.
Great quality.

Cons:
Initial problems with very buggy software.
Toast 9 Basic has very limited feature set.
Incompatibilities with iMovie HD in spite of advertised claims.
Processing time is slow, slow, slow, though not really Roxio’s fault. Video files are big and take a long time to process.

The final rating would have been higher had it not been for the problems I suffered through with the supplied software. I went through far more hoops than most customers would tolerate, even with the able assistance of Roxio’s PR guy–someone most customers would not have access to. In the end, it was worth the effort, and easy VHS to DVD for Mac is now a solid product.

MyMac rating: 3 out of 5.

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Strategic Mobile Design – Creating Engaging Experiences
by Joseph Cartman and Richard Ting
http://www.peachpit.com
222 pages
ISBN: 978-0-321-58007-8
US $34.99, CAN $37.99, UK £22.99

The mobile devices industry is in turmoil–a statement that could be ripped from the headlines of any newspaper, magazine, or website. Not only is the economy in rough shape (something to which I can personally attest), but the traditional cellphone of yore is also undergoing radical changes.

It probably started with the first Palm Treo phones, which introduced the category of smart phone to the public, grew with the Windows Mobile and Blackberry platforms, and ultimately validated with the very successful Apple iPhone.

Many of you with mobile devices have likely suffered through the first and second generation WAP browsers with glacial speed (pre-3G) on phones with tiny screens, and almost wish you could plunge an ice-pick into your skull rather than have to suffer through another WAP browser session. I certainly felt that way, and I worked in the mobile devices industry! Engineers and marketing folks whom I worked with just couldn’t believe that I was being so negative about WAP. Guess I didn’t drink the Kook-Aid.

Enter 3G networks and smartphones. Larger screens, faster processors, and faster networks made it possible to greatly enhance the user experience, and therefore bring more profits to the carriers.

With bigger screens and improved bandwidth came new opportunities for website designers and information developers, and this is where this book comes in.

The authors refer to the shift in mediums from print to electronic (radio/TV), and the web, finally ending with mobile media–content designed expressly for the new mobile devices. They also delve into some of the challenges faced by designers for this new medium–screen sizes, while bigger, are not consistent, so adjustments need to be made to accommodate more than one size screen.

Creative strategy is a three-pronged approach to mobile media: concept, creative, and technology.

• Concept relates to audience research and how mobile media might offer a solution to a perceived or real problem.
• Creative relates to user interface design and how to translate this design to screen sizes varying from 176 x 128 pixels, up to 320 x 240 and even larger.
• Technology relates to how these solutions are delivered to the user: SMS (Simple Message Service) or MMS (Multimedia Message Service), mobile web sites (web sites optimized for mobile devices), downloadable applications, rich technologies (such as Flash), and IVR (Interactive Voice Response).

The authors remind designers about global issues, and how some companies work with these issues. They also do a broad analysis of the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), discussing protocols used and unique issues, cultural and otherwise, within the regions, and help designers with appropriate strategies. For example, mobile users in Japan make extensive use of QR barcodes which users can "scan" with the cameras in their phones. Ultimately, pertinent information related to that barcode is provided to the user without having to type long URLs into their phones, which, if the user doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard, can be a time-consuming and annoying process.

There are so many interesting mobile applications out there that are just now becoming available, such as:

• Micropayment: Use a mobile device to pay for small purchases on the fly.
• Interactive television.
• Controlling digital billboards.
• Google SMS
• Amazon TextBuyIt
• NY Times Real Estate

I never really understood the different modes of communication and how users can benefit from them.

• Mobile to Mobile: Specialized mobile banner ads, cross-linking, SMS, live feeds.
• Web to Mobile: Web to SMS (interact with websites via SMS), download and sync (downloaded apps with a live feed component), interactive voice response (IVR).
• Out of Home (OOH) or Print to Mobile: SMS (get more information on goods and services via SMS) and subscribe to services, Bluetooth and WiFi, 2D Barcodes (QR and Scancode), Mobile Internet to Print, Broadcast to Mobile, Mobile Internet, Radio to Mobile, Podcasts and Audio Streaming, Multichannel.

Next, the authors discuss designing for the intended audience and their handsets and all the technical and design hurdles that need to be overcome.

Interaction design goes into the process of designing for the small screen, including an excellent section on the mobile interaction design process, and why mobile design projects really need process definitions to ensure program success.

Visual design is the fun part; determining what the user is going to see when they access your application or website. It delves into color selection and optimization, as no two mobile devices reproduce colors in the same way. Then there’s typography: can you read the content on the screen without eyestrain? Are you using standardized icons for commonly used symbols? Using page layout to define and standardize what the user sees and how they get from screen to screen. It also goes into the issues of integrating various types of media (video, audio, etc.), as well as file-type standards for efficient transmission over the mobile network.

Then the authors discuss some of the popular and cutting-edge tools used for developing mobile solutions.

The rest of the book details a number of interesting applications for mobile media technology in areas such as location-based shopping, the use of barcodes and RFID technologies, urban navigation with a touch of the social, use in academia, and use in art.

The authors cram a ton of thought-provoking information into this book’s 222 pages. It’s not so much a cookbook as a launching point for developers of applications and technologies being used (or planned for use) in mobile devices–to give them some ideas of what’s been done, and what can be done (the lack of Flash technologies in Apple iPhones notwithstanding). If you are in one of those categories, this is a must-have volume.

MyMac.com rating 4.5 out of 5.

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Visual Quickstart Guide XML (Second Edition)
Kevin Howard Goldberg

Peachpit Press

ISBN: 0-321-55967-3

US $34.99, CDN $37.99

288 pages

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has become the medium to move data in efficient and predictable ways. Derived from a similar markup language, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), XML is structured, but not as highly as SGML. Structure is what itís all about. The very loosely structured HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is also derived from SGML. Even the XML markup looks amazingly like HTML, except, as the author explains, HTML defines how information will look, while XML defines how the information is formatted.

Here is a portion of an XML file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<my_siblings>

<sibling>

<name>Norm</name>

<gender>Male</gender>

<age>65</age>

</sibling>

<sibling>

<name>Nancy</name>

<gender>Female</gender>

<age>52</age>

</sibling>

<sibling>

<name>Guy</name>

<gender>Male</gender>

<age>48</age>

</sibling>

</my_siblings>\

If you analyze the code sample above, you should be able to see that there are three siblings defined. Each siblingís information is contained, or wrapped, between the <sibling> and </sibling> tags, and that the information on those three siblings is wrapped between the <my_siblings> and </my_siblings> tags. Taking this one step further, you can think of these sibling "chunks" as parts of a database: the content between the <sibling> and </sibling> tags would be defined as a record, while the <name></name>, <gender></gender>, and <age></age> tags define fields within a record. This content can then be transformed into content in a different format and reused in many different ways.

In XML, as in HTML, you can also see that each chunk of information is tagged with an opening and closing tag.

Why structure? With a standardized method of defining chunks of information, the information can be easily shared, re-used, translated, and manipulated in infinite ways, yet retain its integrity and its overall definition. XML, being an ASCII text format, is universalóit can be shared among multiple platforms without modification, save for some minor file system issues that are beyond the scope of this review.

One major use of XML is in content management systems (CMS), where it can be searched, selectively extracted, and assembled into larger documents that then can be transformed into final deliverables, such as a PDF file, Help files, or a set of HTML files. Sure, you could probably do this with plain text, but without the underlying required structure, it would be a lot harder, and would probably require a large amount of post-assembly editing before even attempting to create the deliverables.

Another popular use of XML is in Adobe Flash animations and programs. By building the text content in external files formatted as XML that the Flash file points to, dealing with localized (translated) content is an extremely simple matteróoften just changing the filename links in the main Flash file can transform an English language document into a Spanish, French, or whatever document in momentsóand by maintaining the master files in a database-driven content management system, you can translate content that might be used in multiple documents or even multiple times in the same document once and only once, which, I can assure you, results in huge cost savings.

Kevin Howard Goldberg has put together an excellent primer on the multifaceted alphabet soup that is XML. He updated the first edition of this book, originally authored by Elizabeth Castro, with Ms. Castroís assistance, adding information on some of the newer applications of XML: XSL-FO, XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0.

The book is divided into the following sections, each of which builds on the previous chapter:

* XML ñ The basics of writing XML code, and the underlying structure.

* XSL ñ How to transform XML into multiple deliverables (HTML, XML, etc.). It also covers XSLT, XPath, and XSL-FO. XSL-FO is most widely used to transform XML files into PDF deliverables.

* DTD ñ Document Type Definition. DTDs are the underlying glue that holds the XML together. How? By defining and detailing the rules under which valid XML files function. Separate sections discuss entities and notations, as well as validations (ensuring the XML file follows the rules defined in the DTD).

* XML Schema ñ Developed to overcome some of the shortcomings of DTDs, the XML Schema is a more powerful document, designed to give the author even more control over how the XML content is structured and defined.

* XML Namespaces ñ A method of combining XML from multiple sources, even if there are identical element names. XML Namespaces provides a method to merge the content while retaining the definitions of each independent element (I hope I got that rightÖ).

* Recent W3C (World Wide Web Committee) Recommendations ñ Discusses some of the newest enhancements to the XML specifications including XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0.

* XML in Practice ñ Applications of XML, especially in Web 2.0 usage. Topics and examples include Ajax, RSS, SOAP, WSDL, KML, ODF, OOXML, eBooks, ePub, and more. I told you it was an alphabet soup!

* Appendices ñ Discusses XML editors and tools. Full character set and entity tables.

This book is a great introduction to XML. Itís loaded with sample code and examples to get you started. Itís well illustrated and makes great use of color. Peachpit Press also offers a companion website with sample code, updates, etc.

XML is not for the faint-of-heart. There are just so many pieces that comprise the XML specification; it can be confusing, even with this Visual Quickstart Guide. The only thing I didnít see in this book, and most likely because of its inherent specialization is the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) specification. DITA is a highly specialized topic-based XML-based markup language, mainly used for creating instructional materials (user documentation, educational texts, and so on). I recommend this book highly.

MyMac Magazine rating of 4.5 out of 5

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The Ultimate HTML Reference
Ian Lloyd
Sitepoint, distributed by O’Reilly
ISBN 978-0-9802858-8-8
US $44.95, CDN $44.95
544 pages

For over ten years, I have enthusiastically promoted Dave Taylor’s "Creating Cool HTML 4 Web Pages" book as my favorite HTML reference book. Its organization, code examples, and writing style are first-rate. I think I may have found a worthy replacement in Ian Lloyd’s new "The Ultimate HTML Reference", though I say this with the understanding that this book is really intended for the hard-core HTML coder who needs a handy reference for one of those weird commands that didn’t come immediately to mind. This can be a really useful reference for the super-advanced coder, though beginners can get a lot out of this book, too.

Unlike Taylor’s book which was laid out in a format that permitted the user to start with simple tasks and build on them, The Ultimate HTML Reference is organized by HTML elements (Structural Elements, Head Elements, List Elements, Text Formatting Elements, Form Elements, Image and Media Elements, Table Elements, Frame and Window Elements, and Common Attributes) and the attributes within the elements (for example, Chapter 4, List Elements, is divided into the various attributes like dl, dd, dt, dir, li, menu, ol, and ul). It even provides a little instruction for basic Javascript commands like onkeydown, onmousedown, ondblclick, and others.

One of the appendices covers deprecated elements – that is, those elements and attributes that are no longer supported by the newest HTML and XHTML standards (but most browsers still permit their use, just the same). Another covers some of those special (read that annoying) proprietary and nonstandard elements (remember the "blink" command in Netscape–that only worked in Netscape?).

The organization of the book makes it very easy for individuals with at least some HTML coding experience to locate the elements and attributes they need, and describes in just enough detail how to apply them. While there aren’t as many examples as I might like, there seem to be enough for most users. What I do like is the compatibility chart that goes with each attribute. The chart displays compatibility (Full, Partial, and None) of the attribute against several versions of the most currently popular browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Within the book’s first 25 pages, readers receive preparation for upcoming changes to the HTML standards, as XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language, a hybrid of HTML and XML–eXtensible Markup Language–a highly structured, rules-based markup language) begins to take over. XHTML tightens up some of the structuring that was missing in HTML, which makes the code much more readable and easier to modify as needed, and if you need to transition to full XML (for things like content management systems), much of the work has already been done. HTML 4.0 and earlier code, in comparison, can be really sloppy, but it still renders just fine in most browsers. For example, in HTML 4.0, capitalization is optional, and line endings don’t need to be terminated in a formatting attribute, like "</p>".

XHTML also imposes more stringent rules on quoting. Every attribute value must be quoted. For example, quoted attributes like class="gallery" are mandatory in HTML 5.0 and newer. HTML 4.0 code permits code like class=gallery.

The author takes pains to differentiate the older HTML vs the new XHTML, and if you haven’t started coding in XHTML, be prepared to break newer browsers on their way to a computer near you. Not today, but maybe a year or two (or three) from now, the older HTML formats will begin to disappear as XHTML becomes the new standard. If you want to read more about the differences between HTML and XHTML, check this page out. But I digress…

What surprised me were the number of new attributes and elements that I had not used before that are a part of XHTML as well as newer releases of the HTML specification. It turned out to be very useful in a recent office project where we converted one of our product manuals to HTML–a project that had plenty of tricky points to deal with.

What this book only briefly touches is Cascading StyleSheets (CSS), which are used to apply more advanced and creative formatting to web pages. That said, CSS is completely out of scope to this discussion, though it may be good to know that the same publisher, Sitepoint, has a companion volume, "The Ultimate CSS Reference", by Tommy Olsson and Paul O’Brien, also $44.95. I was so impressed, I bought a copy for myself. I’ve already discovered that The Ultimate CSS Reference is equally valuable to a web programmer’s arsenal of reference materials. A Javascript book from Sitepoint is also in the works.

A companion website contains everything in the book, fully hyperlinked and searchable, as an additional valuable resource. It’s free, to boot. The free companion site to the CSS reference book can be accessed at http://reference.sitepoint.com/css.

What can I say? This book replaced Taylor’s book as my primary HTML reference at home and at the office. It’s well worth the 45 dollar price-tag. I can only find fault with the fact that it doesn’t have enough chunks of sample HTML and illustrations of how the HTML will render. Most of my loyal readers (?) know that I’m pretty tough with my ratings, but taking that really small negative into account, I give this book the MyMac Magazine rating of 4.5 out of 5.

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Mac Family Tree 5
Company: Synium Software GmbH
Price: $49.00
http://www.synium.de/products/macfamilytree

I’ve been involved in genealogy work for years. I cut my teeth on the LDS church’s Personal Ancestral File, back in the day when they still published a Mac-compatible version. Since then, I’ve used Reunion from Leister Productions, and a whole slew of Windows-based products, including Brother’s Keeper, The Master Genealogist, and Legacy Family Tree, among others. When I edited and published the 750 page Grinnell family genealogy back in 1997, I used a combination of genealogy database programs and book publishing utilities. It was an exhausting job–one that I am ready to start on again, only this time the book could hit 2,000 pages!

I say all this because MacFamilyTree is not capable of publishing genealogical data in book form, using one of two specific narrative formats most often used in genealogy publishing: New England Historic Genealogical Register or National Genealogical Society Register formats. But my particular needs in this area are a very narrow part of genealogical research–decidedly not in the mainstream. Most people doing genealogical research on their families are not professional or certified genealogists, but dedicated amateur researchers, trying to find out more about their ancestors so they can share that information with the rest of their family. Most of you probably have at least one person in your extended families that fulfills that role, and if they are doing their work on the Macintosh, MacFamilyTree could be just the product for them.

First, the wide range of graphical charts and reports just blow every other genealogy program out of the water. Many of these reports are not necessarily "standard" ones, but that’s OK, too. Some of these reports, which I will describe more fully later, can really bring their ancestors to life in a clear, concise, and understandable way. The developers of MacFamilyTree took full advantage of the Mac OSX graphical user interface, and more importantly, the graphics engine built into OSX, that make quick work out of complicated graphs and charts.

I guess the best place to start with a product like this is to talk about standards. In genealogy, the main standard, that make data inputting and data exchange a breeze, is called GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication), and pronounced "jed-comm". Developed by the LDS church, this is a very robust standard, platform independent, and is the primary way in which genealogists exchange information. Virtually every genealogy software program supports GEDCOM for both input and output, and MacFamilyTree is no exception. What I appreciate about MacFamilyTree is how fast the import is. My huge database of Grinnells consists of over 38,000 individuals, and almost 14,000 families. Most genealogy programs take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to import and process this much information. Mac Family Tree took 45 seconds to import my GEDCOM file. Saving or exporting that same data, however, took about five minutes on a dual 2GHz processor G5 tower, running Tiger. For most of the examples here, I will be using the family of my great-great-great-grandparents, James A. and Mary (Wright) Grinnell, of Jamestown, Rhode Island.

Most work usually begins with the Family Assistant screen. From here, you can locate any individual in the List of Persons list. Once you have selected the person of interest, a quick Person Information menu is displayed above the List of Persons, and to the left, a graphical Person Chart, that displays the person of interest, two generations above, and one generation below, in an attractive graphical format.

Next is the Persons list. Scroll through the list to find the person you are seeking. You can also change how things are sorted by clicking on one of the column headers. Below that is Families (married couples). Columns are set up for the Man, Woman, and Children (sorted oldest to youngest). In any case, double-clicking on a name in either the Persons or Families lists will bring up the complete record on that individual or family, respectively. I apologize in advance for the small screens. You can go to the website and view many of the screendumps in a larger size.

Persons List

Families List

Individual Record

The Individual Record is the core of this product. As you can see in the screen capture above, Mac Family Tree packs a lot of information in a relatively small window. Not only do you use this window to put in the basic events of one’s life, but you can add a large number of events (see screen capture below). Events are things like birth, marriage, and death, but there can be a large number of additional events in one’s life.

Individual Record showing the list of event types

The individual record, once filled out, is a handy place to look at family structures. If you look at the Individual Record screen dump, you will see a graphical representation of a family, referred to as Quick Navigation. The individual whose record is active shows up with a highlighted blue star-like object. Click on any other name, and you are taken to that person’s individual record. Obviously, the width of the window cannot show an entire family, but you can click and drag inside the window to move the contents around for your examination.

Genealogists are extremely critical about how they prove their research. Preferably, primary source data should be used (vital records such as birth, marriage, death; military records; church baptism records; and more), and a record must be kept of these sources. The Sources list takes you to a window where you can enter primary source data, such as local birth records, burial records, marriage records, census information, etc., along with a pull-down menu that shows the degree of credibility of a piece of source material, from unreliable, to questionable (family bible?), and all the way up to first hand (town clerk or census records) information. You can later link source information to each person or family, though that process is somewhat counterintuitive. Photographs can be added to each individual record by dragging the file into the Media window, when in the Individual view only.

The Search item under the Edit section is interesting. The search window. window is set up as pre-built searches on primary events (adoption, birth, burial, death, family, marriage, etc.) . Just scroll to the event type and locate the name of the individual you are looking for. There is a search field in the lower right-hand corner of the MacFamilyTree search window, which can be used to trim down the list of people you are looking for.

Whew! That’s just the editing section. Next comes the views section.

The Virtual View is simply amazing. I’m not sure I can even describe it. In a nutshell, the Virtual View creates a fully linked 3-D cloud where you can zoom in and out, rotate left, rotate right, rotate up, and rotate down. Each person is represented as an avatar, blue for males, and brown for females. The key to using this view efficiently is to use the List of Persons table to select the person you wish to view. That person can easily be seen because they rotate left and right. Moving your mouse cursor over any avatar pops up a small window containing basic information (name, birth date, where born, death date, and where died). The ability to find unlinked people is always a pain. The Virtual View makes that task much easier to do. Each complete family floats in its own cloud. It’s easier to do it than to try to describe it. This is probably the single most significant piece of this software. Admittedly, I was testing a beta release, and found the Virtual View to be a tad unstable (it locked up my computer completely when I tried to resize the window).

The Ancestor Chart displays a pedigree view of the ancestors of the chosen subject. While this graphic is kind of small, there is a slider control to enlarge the display, though doing so will obscure part of the chart.

Ancestor Chart

The fan chart is another type of ancestor chart. What makes this so useful is the way the researcher can immediately see where you have holes in your research. The more complete each row on the fan chart, the more complete your research is. See the sample below.

Fan Chart

The descendant chart is impossibly small to see in a screen dump, so suffice it to say that MacFamilyTree generates a colorful descendant chart, defaulting to about six generations. You can use the slider to expand the chart to permit you to read a small portion of the data.

I got the Timeline to function only after I redid my data set to use a much smaller number of people. This is because the Timeline shows the lifespan of every individual in the entire data set. My computer locked up when I used the original data set consisting of almost 40,000 individuals and 12,000 families.

You can tie MacFamilyTree to Google Earth, so you can see the locations of people and events on a globe.

The Statistics view can be used to show several different types of data: Age Chart of Living Persons, Age of Death, Children per Family, and so on.

The Tutorial best describes the Genogram function: "The Genogram view uses pictograms to show family ties. This view serves to locate and analyze certain patterns and constellations relevant in medical studies, e.g. hereditary diseases, birth defects. In so doing, the Genogram expands the perspective of the family tree and is designed to detect and trace recurrent behavior patterns within a family of relevance for psychotherapy or family therapy."

There are a ton of reports that you can generate from MacFamilyTree, too. Things such as a List of Persons, Person Report (all the data about an individual), Kinship Report (how an individual is related to everyone else), Places (a list of all places like cities, towns, cemeteries, churches, etc). Events summarizes births, marriages, and deaths by decade. Distinctive persons identifies people whose information may be out of the norm, such as new parents in their late 40s, large numbers of children, and so on. Birthdays are summarized by date and the names of individuals born on that date.

Finally, you can publish your information as a series of static web pages, published to your own hard drive, to a MacFamilyTree.com site sponsored by Synium, or to your website on .Mac. You can also burn a CD with the static web pages. My only criticism here is the individual and family lists are single HTML pages, which could take a long time to load if the database has a large number of individuals and families.

I had a few challenges with this program, mostly related to my enormous Grinnell family database, and because I wanted to check out some of the newest features that are included in the beta version of the product (in particular, the really neat Virtual View). After experiencing a few problems, and finally realizing it was because many of these reports and screens are generated dynamically, I heavily reduced the size of my data set, which made things run much better. I can only say that if you have a large data set (over 10,000 individuals), I would strongly recommend that you load your computer with as much RAM as possible, and use the fastest Core 2 Duo processor you can get your hands on.

All of that said, MacFamilyTree is a really nice program for the casual researcher. I loved the charts and the overall ease of use and its intuitive nature.

At the same time, it is very resource-hungry, a tad unstable (perhaps due to evaluating a public beta release), it slows to a crawl when working with large data sets, and it lacks a number of reports many professional genealogists expect to see (though you could argue that this program is more suitable for the amateur, and if that’s the case, the user may not even miss the charts). It also lacks the ability to publish this information as a book–only as a website. Is that important to you? You will need to decide this for yourself. I might use this program in parallel with a more standard genealogy database, just so I can use and share MacFamilyTree’s neat charts.

To read the blog on the state of Mac genealogy software that I wrote last year, please check out this lin.k

MyMac rating: 3.5 out of 5

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