Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Ooooh. I’m so mad.

I had forgotten that it was three months ago that my old computer crashed and I purchased a new one. I upgraded to Delphi 2009 which allowed me to add Unicode earlier than I thought I would, and I was really rolling.

But last week I realized that the 3 month expiry of the last alpha version of Behold was coming up again. I would have to recompile it and release a new trial.

… but I couldn’t. The previous version was compiled with Delphi 4 and older versions of TRichView and ElPack. The installation of those packages were not only not easy, but I’m not sure if I could do them at all under Window Vista 64 bit. It just wasn’t worth it.

So there is currently no trial available for new visitors. They’ll have to wait until the Beta is released. I have in the meantime, placed a form on the download page to allow them to enter their name and email address and I’ll notify them when the Beta becomes available.

Rather than trying to get the old stuff working again, I’d rather forge ahead towards the Beta. And this “blackhole” in Behold availability is sure to push me to get the Beta out sooner than later.

I’ve been working very hard the last few weeks to rewrite the internals of Behold for the sake of efficiency. I’ve written much about the details of this work, and the Beta release of Behold has basically been waiting until I complete this.

I consider this extremely important. Behold will need to load large files quickly and efficiently. Everyone is used to this because most programs “cheat” by having a database already built in their own internal format. They already have the name and place indexes pre-built and with the database. They also tend to only look at one family at a time, and the amount of data they need to load is limited. They can be fast.

My task is to load data into Behold and display it, even for very large files, fast enough to not be a concern. GEDCOM Files of a hundred megabytes should be able to be read, interpreted and indexed in a few seconds. Display should be instantaneous.

It is getting the latter to happen that has been causing me the last few months of hard labor. Taking the TRichview package, and faking it out so that it thinks the document is only the page you are viewing, the page before and the page after, has been a real challenge.

Everything in this work is new to me. I’ve been having to go into the guts of TRichview to see what it does. I’ve had to learn to intercept keystrokes and mouse movements and handle them before TRichview does. I’ve had to learn how to take over the scrollbars to fake them up to make it appear that you are on a given page in a large document. I still haven’t reimplemented printing, print preview, finding text, and some of the navigation keys.

The bottom line is that this is tough stuff. Each step involves researching a solution, and often coding, testing, recoding and retesting. Problems can occur due to very low level Windows methods interfering with each other. Then a solution needs to be researched and tried with more rewriting. This is difficult, but I am happy to be making slow and steady progress to the goal, which does appear to be achieveable.

The bad news is that in the next two weeks, I’ll again release an interim Behold version with no changes just to prevent the 90 day expiry date limit.

The good new is that I am very motivated, and I’m working hard on Behold to get these improvements in and get to the Beta as soon as is possible.

Have you tried Bing yet? This is Microsoft’s new search tool, designed to finally compete with Google. It’s actually quite good. Whether it will be able to compete with Google is a matter of intellectual debate.

Search engines are good for genealogists. Most often we enter our ancestors names into search engines and often find all sorts of interesting leads. Many people have found My Family Research Page that way, and I have had great success through that medium (letting others come to me), connecting me to over 50 previously unknown relatives on many of my lines of research.

When you have a webpage, you want to be able to be found. Often, the “experts” tell you to “optimize” your web pages so the search engines can find you. That’s hogwash. All you have to do is put good content up, not try to hide anything, and you will be found.

As I’m interested in “Genealogy Software”, and I periodically enter that term into different search engines and see what comes out. I also like to see where my GenSoftReviews page ranks in that search. Currently on Google, it is 13th, is 18th on Bing, and unless I missed it does not seem to be in the top 100 on Yahoo. I guess that’s not bad for not trying.

But what really blows me away is this Behold website. I’m not sure how, but as of now, if you simply search for the word “Behold” on the various search engines, you’ll find beholdgenealogy.com number 10 on Google, number 4 on Yahoo, number 5 on Bing. This is out of tens of millions of results.

I find this quite odd. Obviously, I don’t mind that result, but if I were going to a search engine and looking for the word “Behold”, I doubt if I would be expecting a program for genealogy to come up in the top results.

But this does assure me that Behold was a good name for my program, and that it’s getting well-embedded into the Internet. Soon I’ll make the next step and hopefully get it embedded into the genealogy world as well.