It’s About Time for Version 1.1 - Mon, 5 May 2014

This is starting to get ridiculous. I’ve spent the close to 2 years trying to design and implement all the complexities of 3 new features that I think will be really important to help you with your genealogical research, which I’ve called: Ages Everywhere, Life Events, and Who’s Alive at Events.

The work I was doing on these just seemed to mushroom. The “Ages Everywhere” started veering off into Consistency Checking. I had to deal with handling Multiple Events. The Life Events led me to Who’s Alive at Events. This required estimating ages so that those people without birth dates could be stated to be “likely” or “possibly” living at an event. Then it was a matter of ordering and storing them and … it got messy, I must say. There were too many ideas at once, and the data structure developed for one idea got messed up by the next idea.

Trying to work on too much at once just doesn’t work. It leaves you in a state of everything being somewhat unfinished. And putting Behold down for a bit of time (for RootsTech, family vacation, writing a magazine article, new computer, my father passing away) was always difficult to pick up again where I left off. It’s always best to try to finish a little piece and then add to it, always leaving everything in a working state of completion.

So I’m going to try to change this. I’ve made a number of enhancements to my working version of Behold over the past year that have been marked as “done” on the Future Plans page. I’m going to release the first set of changes which will include the merging of family events into both spouses to make the output of each individual resemble a timeline, and include the individuals’ age at events. I’ll release this as soon as possible as version 1.1. This will be a significant change

Then I’ll move ahead and work on one major thing at a time, releasing the Life Events as version 1.1.1, and follow that the with Who’s Alive at Events as version 1.1.2. Then Consistency Checking, Saving GEDCOMs and the Behold Database. The plan is in place. I just have to make sure I continue to move forward and make progress.

But before my next release, I’ll have to update my code signing certificate for Behold. Doing the update is a PITA (pain in the rear-end), but the certificate has expired so I have to. They give me a whole 3 days notice, which is nowhere near enough time. In addition to the onerous procedure I went through last time, this time I have to also get a licenced notary or attorney to confirm that the documents I am sending them actually are for me. What are they going to add next time. Will I have to be fingerprinted and strip searched? I get a 3 year certificate each time, but I’d get a longer one if they had it, just to avoid the hassle this involves. Now I understand why some software developers don’t bother with a certificate, even though it adds safety for the user.

Now, back to work.