Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Here’s a quick and needed release.

Unfortunately the web update feature of Behold in 0.99.1 through 0.99.3 beta of Behold was not working on Vista or Windows 7.

The web update downloads the behold-setup file to the Program Files directory where Behold is. Unfortunately, Vista and Windows 7 do not allow a program to add files to that directory, and that gives an error. To get around this, I now download that to the temporary files directory.

What this means is you may not be able to upgrade to the newest version of Behold with the web update. This now should be fixed in 0.99.4 but of course you won’t be able to try it until 0.99.5 comes out. For now, if Behold’s web update won’t work for you, then as I said in my last blog post, go to Behold’s download page and click the download link and run the setup from there.

There are a few other fixes in this version as well. See the version history.

Thank you for all your bug reports. Please keep them coming until I get rid of them all.

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.