Behold Future Plans

This page is basically my ToDo list and was last updated on Wednesday May 22, 2013

Note: the dates shown below are my optimistic goal dates IEGP (If Everything Goes Perfectly). They may change, but I am striving for them.

Version 1.0.5, planned for May 2013. (Ancestral Loops)

Fix: Ensure that the file information and summary of messages is displayed even when a file does not have a HEAD record.
Impr: Enlarge the Find Files file reading buffer that reads the HEAD record from 512 bytes to 2048 bytes so that less information from longer HEAD sections gets missed.
Fix: Display the text following a 2nd embedded hyphen in log file messages and in the log file summary.
Impr: Replace the Ancestral Loop checking code with a DFS (Depth First Search) algorithm to properly identify all the people who are their own ancestor. Previously, loops were identified, but some people in loops were missing when their ancestor was in a different loop.
New: Add an "Ancestral Loops" section to the Everything Report just before the File Information, to display all the loops and all the people in them parent to child with birth and death dates and messages that will help identify and fix the problem. There must be at least one loop for the section to display.
Del: Remove ancestral loop messages from the log files. They are not a GEDCOM problem, but are a data problem and thus should be in the Everything Report.
Fix: Don't give errors for dates containing mixed case.
Impr: Provide a message when there are extra spaces in the GEDCOM between date parts.
Fix: Don't display incorrect messages given for tags added to GEDCOM that are encountered prior to encountering the GEDCOM version number.
Fix: Don't display a message for an illegal tag that is under a custom tag. Anything (unfortunately) is allowed under a custom tag.
Impr: Add option to not display an individual's sources sorted by source title, but to instead display them in the order they were in the GEDCOM file - requested by user Nick Jackson.
Impr: Improve the messages displayed when the character set specified in the header does not match the Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the start of the file.

Version 1.1, planned for May 2013. (Life Events, Age at Events, Date Consistency Checking)

Fix: Handle Hex 00 in GEDCOM files.
Del: Remove "file://" from the URIs automatically detected. It is a bit more complicated that I thought due to embedded spaces and local file paths, so rather than doing it wrong sometimes, for now I won't link it all at. To be looked at again in the future.
Fix: Remove the extra space displayed prior to a TYPE descriptor that redefines its superior tag.
Fix: Don't link SOUR tags that have no link reference and no link text to anything (was being linked to @S1@).
Impr: Display children ordered by birthdate.
Impr: Display spouses ordered by marriage date.
Fix: Eliminate duplication in the Source Details of inline sources (an old GEDCOM technique).
Fix: Split links with both forward and backward information if the backward information has changed.
New: Display the person's age next to each event date where the age is determinable.
New: Check for illogical dates relative to other dates, like a child born before the parent is born, with messages added to the applicable event in the Everything Report so they are in context and where you'll want to see them.
Fix: Eliminate abend when searching for a text in files with the "whole word" option set in a Unicode file with a BOM where the text is not found. (The BOM was removed for the search but the length of the BOM was not subtracted from the length of the file, so it tried to read after the end of the file buffer.)
Impr: Change the default for the "CHAN" tag from "Change:" to "Last Modified:"
Impr: Change the text to display option from "Known to have happened" to "Confirmed"
Fix: Repair the Find function for some multi-word searches that didn't find the result or didn't highlight the result found.
Impr: Include the "probate" tag and the "will" tag as two of the tags that are ordered and placed after the death tag for an individual.

Impr: Denote alternative birth and death events with an "Alternative" designator so that the primary birth and death can be easily identified. Allow the text for this designator to be customized and a selection of whether or not these should be hidden.
Impr: Merge family events into both spouses and remove the family events.
New: Expand the list of children, parents and other spouses into their individual events and use the birth and marriage dates to appropriately place those as events for each person.
Fix: Do not display the first person in the file, when they have no family spouse or family, as a starting ancestor. (This bug was introduced in version 1.0.1).
New: Show the current age of living people
Fix: Ensure the "Apply" button forces a re-read of the data after changing the CONC value on the GEDCOM's page.
Impr: Reopen Behold on the last screen used when opening in a maximized form.
Impr: Include the point version number in check when checking for new versions. During beta, point versions weren't important and came often, but with the full release, point versions may be bug fixes and other small changes.
New: Create a new fundamental concept: "Life Events" - events of family members that are important in the life of the individual. This is to be shown under each individual and in addition to all the person's events and their family events, it will include their parent's events, sibling's events and children's events, as well as grandparents, uncles/aunts, nephews/nieces, grandchildren and spouse's equivalents.
New: Include only dated life events, and sort them within each individual by date.
New: Show the age of the individual at the time of the event.
New: Add each type of person into the Organize Report page under "Life Events", so that each person type can be renamed as desired.
New: Use a special color for the person type of life events so they can be easily distinguished from regular events.
New: Include the age if known for any cross referenced individuals.
New: Include the ages and length of time married if known for any cross referenced couples.
New: Display "smart ages", where before birth and after death are identified, and "smart time married", where before marriage and after divorce are identified.
New: Add a menu item and tool bar icon to display or hide all the life events.
New: Allow selection of which categories of relatives will have their life events included in the Everything Report. The person types work in threes with the first (no gender) selectable, and the other two (female and male) having the same setting as no gender.
New: Label an individual's birth and death tags that are included after the first as "alternate" birth/death events and number them for reference. Do the same for marriage and divorce events occurring more than once in a FAM record.
New: Include a listing of who's alive/deceased at birth/marriage/death events, with the ability to select what level of depth of people to include and which event types to include them in.
New: Add a life event details menu item and toolbar button, to toggle the showing or hiding of all the details and sources of every life event.
New: Ensure that the changing of any life event settings in the Organize Report page will refresh the Everything Report to include the new settings.
New: Number the relatives by relative type correctly, usually by age (oldest to youngest) when the birthdates and marriage dates are known, but retain the priority of the order of children and marriages.
New: Add date consistency checking, that verifies event dates by comparing them with each person's birth and death dates and placing a message in the Everything Report next to the suspicious date.
New: Add user-definable age limits to specify generalized minimum and maximum ages for certain types of events.
New: Add a warning when a person is related in multiple ways.
New: Add menu items and tool bar icons to find the next and previous consistency message.

Version 1.1.1, planned for June 2013.

New: Add the sources of the events to the Place Index.
Help: Update documentation to include 1.0.1 through 1.1 changes.

Version 1.5, (previously was Versions 1.1 and 1.2, but renamed to 1.5, since it's half way to editing!!! Yay!), planned for Sept 2013. (Behold Database, Saving GEDCOMs, 64-bit)

Impr: Update development system from Delphi 2009 to Delphi XE3, including upgrades of TRichView and ElPack 3rd party packages.
Fix: Implement RichView's rvseoMultiItem for searches that will properly find searches of phrases where parts of it are formatted differently. This capability was added to Version 12 of RichView.
New: Export everything to GEDCOM in valid 5.5.1 format, minimizing changes necessary when the input is invalid or from a different version of GEDCOM.
New: Export to GEDCOM only the information displayed in the Everything Report. This way only the selected families and selected tags will be be included.
New: Ensure exported GEDCOM will read in without errors and will export again identically.
Impr: Solidify GEDCOM parsing, so that 5.5 and 5.5.1 are both handled as correctly as possible, with appropriate messages when the standard is not followed.
New: Create both 32-bit and 64-bit executables for Behold.
New: Develop a disk-based Behold database and save it in a .bhp (Behold Project) file instead of keeping all the data in memory.
New: Windows 8 Certification.

Version 2.0, planned for March 2014. (Editing!!!)

New: Powerful genealogy data editing capability directly through the Everything Report. Behold will become a Genealogy Word Processor.
New: Ribbon interface
New: Editing shortcuts
Fix: Get selections larger than a few pages to work.
New: Add Undo/redo/repeat capability at the record level.
New: Auto-save to database after each record edit is completed so very little data can be lost.
New: Source Panel to provide instant access to and entry of the active source that any data entered will pertain to.

Version 2.1, planned for July 2014. (Evidence/Conclusion Modelling)

New: Add ability to add evidence directly into the Source Index and add extracted events to that and link them back to the people, families and places to which they pertain.
New: Allow inclusion of events: people/date/place/notes info for all events within each source detail.
New: Provide mechanism for easy linking of people in each event to people in the database.
New: Include an ability to allow people, places or sources to be assigned one or more group-tags.
New: Allow ability to display people, places or sources for a specified selection of tags.

Version 2.2, planned for November 2014. (Virtual Merging)

New: "Virtual Merging": Allow identification of identical people in different files, and store this info in a Behold file. Possibly use the _UID tag for this.
New: Automatically treat individuals in all GEDCOMs loaded into Behold with the same AFN (Ancestral File Number) tag as the same person in the Everything report.
New: Combine separate data records about individuals in the Everything report. (e.g. to reconstitute pedigree GEDCOMs obtained from familysearch.org)
New: Add a custom tag to display a reference link to the input file, e.g. [F12], following the data it comes from whenever there is more than one input GEDCOM file.

Version 2.3, planned for July 2015. (Photos)

New: Display thumbnails of photos in Everything Report.
New: Display the IPTC metadata stored inside pictures.
New: Export thumbnails of photos (graphic files) to HTML.
New: Export thumbnails of photos to RTF.

Version 2.4, planned for December 2015. (Mac, iOS, Android, Unix Versions)

New: Convert to the FireMonkey Framework, which will allow development of Behold for other platforms.
New: Purchase/customize/convert 3rd party packages that Behold needs to work with FireMonkey.
New: Convert installation routines to work with other platforms.
New: Convert documentation to work on other platforms.
New: Release Behold for other platforms.

More Things that WILL be included somewhere, somewhen, somehow ...

Impr: Implement background processing of life events.
Impr: Enhance smart sort to include a check for "Date of Import: dd Mmm yyyy" and sort those dates properly.
Impr: Use less memory for printing, print previewing and exporting by blocking the report, rather than generating all of it in memory at once.
New: Add navigation menu items and shortcuts for quick access to the previous person, next person, up to parents, up to older sibling, down to younger sibling, down to oldest child, and any others that may add convenience.
Impr: Allow those Organize settings that don't require data loading to only do a page refresh.
Impr: Ensure Behold gracefully reads random files that might accidentally be thrown at it.
Impr: Add cut, copy, paste onto the right-click menu.
Impr: Add a toolbar icon for "Close".
New: Add up, down, left (to parents) and right (to next generation) navigation as keys, menus and icons.
Impr: Get Print Preview for large files to display right away even while the rest of it is loading.
Impr: Work through all my user-supplied GEDCOM test cases and make sure that the Everything Report works properly and looks good for all flavors of GEDCOM.
New: Allow Behold to work as a portable application.
New: Add a menu/toolbar item in Behold to export Behold to a pen drive (i.e. as a portable application).
New: Add a Married Names page to the Organize Information, to allow selection of which spouses of each marriage do and do not take on their partner's surname.
New: Add a right-click option to specify that the selected married surname should not be (or should be) displayed.
New: Include support for Tamura Jones' Classical Genealogy Framework.
New: Add a right-click option to hide any event, and a right-click option to select events to unhide.
Impr: Allow the Shift key or Ctrl key or Ctrl-A shortcuts to allow multiple selections in the Organize Pages and maybe include a Tick/Untick all box.
New: Display custom events by their TYPE tag.
Impr: Add custom text of "- no details" for assertions (i.e. that an event took place but no details about it), instead of just showing "Y".
Impr: Make sure Behold displays multiple parents appropriately.
Impr: Ensure that copying to the clipboard includes rich text so that pasting to any application, e.g. Word or e-mail, includes hypertext that works.
Impr: Ensure Behold's windows and boxes look good in both the Large Font and Small Font Windows settings.
Impr: Ensure that everything works when multiple files are loaded using both GEDCOM and Family ordering.
Fix: Fix Richview's handling of wordwrap when multiple spaces are wrapped.
Fix: Do not pass highlight lines to exported RTF or HTML when the cursor is over it and highlighting it.
New: Create a Tools->Options menu item and build the Window for program options.
New: Finalize and Implement all Program Option settings, possibly including:
- Different ways to display surnames.
- Choice of Font and Font size and color.
- Optional Title Page, and what to include on it.
- Start with number 1 person in file as Main person.
- Style selection of hyperlinks.
- Style selection of the hidden tags when all tags are shown.
- What to open on startup: a certain file, the last file opened, or no file.
- Options on the History List; Ability to clear the History List
- Option to print in black and white without underlining (to save your ink).
- Option to expand places in the TreeView so that they expand level by level.
Impr: Rewrite of Print and Print Preview functions.
New: Allow find function to search without differentiating for case or accents.
Impr: Allow Families of both spouses to be considered to be one family.
Impr: Let InstantOrg optionally select both spouses as one family instead of two.
New: Allow specification of a "Home directory" so that relative paths for objects will work and so many full pathnames can be simplified. This home directory for each GEDCOM should be saved in the Behold file.
New: Allow a dropdown to select from recently accessed directories when Opening and Saving files.
New: Add a "User Reference Numbers" cross reference section.
New: Handle notes that use note indicators based on PAF conventions.
New: Add a "reveal tags" button to show the GEDCOM level and tag used in a manner similar to the way WordPerfect's "reveal codes" works.
New: Allow sending of personalized and customized trees to your relatives with one-click!
Impr: Add a toolbar edit box attached to the Find icon to allow direct entry of text to be found.
New: Add an "Open with Behold" option for GED and BHO files for right clicks from Explorer.
New: Display all Relationships of every person to the reference person (or couple), even multiple relationships (e.g. cousins on two sides) or relationships through marriage, e.g. wife of 3rd cousin.
New: Add an option to include the specific relationship, e.g. fm-ssd (father's mother's son's son's daughter) for a 2nd cousin once removed
New: Add an option to include the common ancestor's name and a link to the ancestor.
New: Add an option to include the relationship information to titles.
New: Add an option to include the relationship information in the Index of Names.
Spinoff: Consider developing a utility program for Behold that would automatically retrieve all data for a specific person and all their relatives from familysearch.org.
New: Search and display (highlight?) possible matches of people, places, events,... in multiple input files.
Impr: Add various Richview features to the Everything Report.
New: Implement automatic detection of places in the Residence, Address, and other tags and give them hyperlinks and index them with the PLAC tag places.
New: Add Unicode Spellchecking
New: Estimation of all dates.
New: Allow assignment of people to one or more selectable "Groups", e.g. neighbors, friends, etc.
New: Add a Group index section to display the group information and who's in what groups.
New: Add limits to families and groups so only desired generations above and below the selected people are included.
New: Allow dates marked as "inconsistent" to be indicated as "verified". This tag will be saved in the GEDCOM file.
New: Allow the option to exclude of living people from the display, reports and export.
New: Privacy filtering.
New: Data for and about Places
New: Allow Entry of Pets along with their Owner's Genealogies
New: Presentation of data as of a certain date.
New: Automatic generation of an RSS feed of changes made, customized for the reader's family. (This will blow your mind!)
New: Check for a default.bho file in the Behold directory. If it exists, use that file for the Organize defaults. If not, go back to the program defaults.
New: Add ability to save Organize settings as default, or to delete the default settings and go back to program defaults.
Impr: Change show/hide tags icon as a drop box that allows choosing between "All tags" and "useful tags" ... or put this in the Status bar. This will make it more obvious as to the importance of this feature which many users may not use enough.
New: Include a box for the search phrase and its history.
New: Autocomplete/correct capability
New: Provide language keyboards for easy input of characters in different languages.
New: Snippet library for quick input of your more common entries.
New: User-defined custom tags
New: Your own numbering for sources.
New: A capability for source-based data entry.
New: Include Task Panes on the Ribbon to provide help on how to use and enter every possible type of genealogical information you may encounter.
New: Add an export to email or export to PDF function.
New: Add text/comments to bottom of photo.
New: Add face tagging.
New: Embed info into photo.
New: Add photo-zoom to photos in HTML and Everything Report.

Other Interesting Ideas. (But remember, Behold's main duty is to be an efficient genealogy data editor and viewer. Possibilities here include partnering with another program that specializes in one or more of the tasks below and getting Behold to share data with it.)

Internationalize Behold itself, allowing the program text to be various languages. Get users to do translations. (Possibly translate the help file as well - huge job, plus maintenance issues!)
Task / Todo list
Calendar Conversions
Data backup functionality
Ability to view HTML tags (bold, italic, links, etc.) embedding within GEDCOM, but this might entail building a web browser into Behold, which is overkill.
Printing Address Labels
Import from Online Genealogy Software such as PhpGedView and FamilySearch and whoever may make an API (Application Programming Interface) available.
Direct reading of data from many different Genealogy programs.
Timelines and/or Charting
Lookup place names on Google.
Support and generation of .kml files for input into Google Earth and other mapping tools.
Photo editing
Web info search or info match
Import and Export to/from alternative GEDCOM formats including XML variants.
Organizer type of functionality
Support for Smartphones and Handhelds
Speech Recognition
Text to Speech