Category: Design

I like Microsoft’s Photosynth for the iPhone. It is a really quick way of creating and sharing panoramic photography. This was the first reason I ever had to install Silverlight. I posted several panoramas from our recent trip in New Zealand.

For some time I have been looking for a way to visualize my complete family tree. Not just the usual ancestor/descendent charts, but really all of them together in one big chart. Until now I could only get yEd to do this job, since it imports GEDCOM. Here is a screenshot of what yEd can do:

The problem was that yEd cannot deal with UTF-8 and it also does not include photographs or dates. It just prints the network of people. It does also not respect the generations or gender.

The latest version of Mac Family Tree introduced a new “Tree” visualization which is pretty close to what I want. It plots every person in the tree and does show meta data. It included photographs and respects the concept of generations. To be able to get everybody onto one sheet that can possibly be printed, Mac Family Tree breaks the tree into smaller sections and links them by lines or reference numbers. This might be a necessary, but in my case it produces many small “left over” branches at the bottom. So close, but still not perfect. Maybe the next version will have an improved layout algorithm.

 

 

 

If you ever wondered what my research focus is, well, here it is: