Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

11. When you’ve still got Windows Vista.

10. When your monitors are so old that one flashes for 30 seconds when it starts up and the other’s color doesn’t match. Yes, you could simply get new monitors if this is your only problem.

9. You can’t connect to your home network because every time you try to turn it on, it turns itself off … and you’ve spend countless hours looking for a solution that doesn’t involve disabling your firewall.

8. Search indexing started slowing down your computer so much, you had to turn it off, and now your searches take forever.

7. The card reader stopped working so long ago, you can’t remember when.

6. You turn it on when you arrive home and hope it has booted before you’ve finished supper.

5. Your hard drive is 3/4 full. Yes, you could simply get a bigger hard drive if this is your only problem.

4. You’ve been thinking about getting a new computer for at least a year.

3. The computer you’d love to get just went on sale for $150 off this week.

2. You’ve decided to reorganize everything from scratch and go paperless.

1. The time has come.

I have been busy the past couple of years. Busy trying to assemble my thoughts about the genealogy software of today and the software for tomorrow. I’ve had my eyes open and I’ve been listening intently. The winds are changing somewhat and course corrections for all developers are required if they want to satisfy genealogists’ future needs.

Since 2012, my ideas have been further advanced.

I listened intently to the goings on from RootsTech 2013, and then again went to Salt Lake City for RootsTech 2014 (giving a talk) which included a valuable day for developers coined the Innovator’s Summit. I gave seven talks on the 2013 Unlock The Past Cruise from Sydney Australia. I wrote an 8 page article comparing genealogy software for the October 2013 Family Tree Tracker magazine.

I helped form and helped grow the Genealogy and Family History question and answer site on StackExchange. I got significantly involved socially in genealogy through Twitter and Google Plus. I’ve kept in tune with all the new software that’s come out and how people feel about their software through my GenSoftReviews site. I experimented with smartphones and going paperless. And I’ve blogged.

I’ve talked or otherwise communicated directly with many notable people in the genealogy field one on one and shared ideas wit them, including technologists like: Tamura Jones, Tim Forsythe, Ryan Heaton, Dovy Paukstys, John Ralls, Tony Proctor and Bill Harten; with genealogy developers including Tom Wetmore (LifeLines), Richard Thomas (Clooz), Luc Comeau (GenViewer, Legacy), Darrin Lythgoe (The Next Generation) and Bob Velke (The Master Genealogist); and with notable bloggers including Dear Myrtle, Dick Eastman, Randy Seaver, James Tanner, Jill Ball and Alona Tester.

Over the past two years, I’ve taken my ideas about genealogy software to task. These are some of the new important conclusions I have come up about future genealogy software that few developers today are considering:

1. Genealogists want to keep their own data separate. Many online shared trees  are trying to come up with one “conclusion”. That is okay as long as they allow everyone to keep their data separate and retrievable again. They do not want others destroying their years of work.

2. Genealogists want to share. They want to put their data online and they want to send their data to their relatives and allow their relatives to read it. But they don’t want others just taking their data blindly and adding it to other databases.

3. They want connectivity. They want to sync to their online database. They want to sync data between multiple programs. They want all synching to be fast  and failsafe.

4. Data input must be simple. Input is the number one time taker. It’s got to be streamlined and fast. If it takes 5 minutes to set up a single source citation, do you think the average person will look forward to entering all their sources?

5. The program must know what is wanted. Few people want to set up their own options any more. They expect the program to give reasonable defaults that work without fiddling. They don’t want the program to ask them a half dozen questions whenever they open or save a file.

6. Portability. Is there a phone app for that?

7. Social, social, social. Tweet this. Like that.

8. No thinking required. When did you last see someone under 40 read the documentation, or use the help file? If three tries don’t do it, then it doesn’t work.

9. Useful. Nah. Forget it. Just make them spend thousands of hours entering all their genealogy data. Why bother trying to make it useful?

10. Fun. Give them a goal. Make the numbers go up. Make it a game.

Watch how the young people are using computers. They are the 99%. We old fogeys are the 1%.

Last week I used #RootsTech to attempt the start of what may become a radical change to the way I work.

It started with an experiment. I had said in an earlier blog post what items I would be carrying with me. At RootsTech 2012 the list included my digital camera, my cellphone, my laptop, a pen, a binder with my notes for the conference, and extra looseleaf in the binder to take notes during the talks. This year, I replaced all that with my Windows Phone. I also debated about the pen, and ended up taking it with the goal of seeing how long I could go without using it.

When I posted on Google plus about doing this, one response was that I was very brave to leave my laptop at home. But since I was giving a talk about Windows Phone for Genealogists, I thought doing this would add to the experiment.

The number one best thing about this experiment was the freedom I found I had. I no longer needed to carry a bag with a binder and/or laptop. Both my hands were always free. I could whip my phone out of my front pocket whenever I needed to take a picture, record some notes, check the schedule, do some live tweeting or check my email or the #Rootstech Twitter feed. As it turned out, I never used my pen, and instead opened OneNote to take down short notes and took a picture for anything more.

During the Conference, the phone was perfect for all my needs. But I do admit there were a few tasks where I missed my laptop. At night, I would go to my hotel’s business center and use their computer to do my blog posts and update my websites. Those tasks are possible on my phone, but the tools aren’t as good, multiple windows can’t be viewed side by side, and my 60 word per minute touch typing speed gets slowed down considerably. Maybe in a few years these problems will be solved and the smartphone can be used for everything.

This may just be the beginning of a bigger experiment - to see if I can start going paperless at home as well. It’s a different way of thinking for a guy who has for years kept shelves of binders and books full of organized written material.