Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

New beta is out. I recommend everyone upgrade ASAP. I was not happy with the first beta. It had a number of errors that would crash the program. I believe I have fixed all that have been reported and additional ones that I have found, so the new beta should be much more stable than the previous.

But first things first: If you try to do an auto-upgrade from the last beta, it may work, or you may get an “Error occurred” box, or it may update but when it tries to start up again you get an “Unable To Locate Component” error box. In the last two cases, please just go to the Behold download page, and click the download link and run the setup from there. Then everything should be okay. - No. I’m not happy about that either, but I’ll try to make sure it won’t occur again in the future. Unfortunately, this is what a beta is for - to get the kinks out.

None-the-less, this version should be better than the last. The hardest bug to fix was the scroll up and scroll down keys which would cause an exception everytime they reached a horizontal line with an ID number at the right. Those are tables in TRichview, and I wasn’t restoring the current selection correctly in my virtualization routine. I needed Sergey (the developer of TRichview)’s help, and just today it was solved. Then I thought I could get the new version out tonight, and I ran into the auto-upgrade problems when I tested it. But it’s too late tonight (2:45 a.m.) to see exactly why and maybe to fix it. So I’ll have to leave it.

Still some important things coming before I consider this beta functionally complete. I want to improve a few things before I set up the Behold News newsletter again and then try to stabilize and document towards version 1.

I thought I’d let the readers of this blog be the first to know: Tonight I put up a new page on my GenSoftReviews sight. It’s a User Choice Awards page, to recognize the genealogy software programs that are rated well by their users.

I tabulated the rating scores of the programs with 10 or more user reviews, and those with a rating of at least 4 out of 5 were given an award.

Hopefully this will generate a little interest in the genealogical community.

2009 was a good year. I finally got the first beta of Behold out. Although the beta has a few kinks to work out, I know I’ll clean those up in short order and we’ll be on our way to version 1 that will lead into version 2 and editing.

I couldn’t have been more pleased and surprised to read that yesterday Tamura Jones gave Behold an “honourable mention” for the 2009 GeneaAwards in the Most Improved Product of 2009. RootMagic 4 won that category and they definitely deserve the top honor with all the improvements they’ve made this year. See the Awards at: http://www.tamurajones.net/GeneAwards2009.xhtml (note: Internet Explorer cannot view the page. You’ll have to use a browser like Firefox or Google Chrome).

So what can I say about the next decade (and I know there are purists who don’t believe the next decade is starting, but personally, I find the “1″ in “2010″ quite significant). Well, if I might be so brash as to predict that by then, most people would have got rid of their “good enough” genealogy programs, and we’ll have had a significant number of computer genealogists migrate from their inefficient forms based systems to the friendlier and easier word processing model that Behold will introduce.

Ten years from now, I should have succeeded to have gone through my boxes of family data, and have them all entered (using Behold) into a complete and very useable personal family history. I can hardly wait.

I wish each and every one of you a healthy and happy New Year and many more after that.