Sunday, August 05, 2007

RootsMagic 3

Boy, did I get some information wrong while visiting the BYU Family History and Genealogy Conference. I was told by someone manning the RootsMagic booth that RootsMagic was not going to release RootsMagic 4 until New FamilySearch was fully released. Seems my information was very incorrect. Mike the (VP) tried to comment on my blog to correct this false information and my blog wasn't allowing it to show. Not sure what's up with that! I really hope others aren't having this same problem.

Bruce Buzbee was kind enough to email me and let me know the deal. First RootsMagic has a policy to NEVER comment on release dates on major new versions. RootsMagic will release a version of RM that supports NFS as soon as NFS API is frozen, BUT they have never said what version that would be.

It seems RootsMagic and Legacy are having the same problem. Since the church hasn't locked in the coding for them to program to interface with NFS they cannot say when that will be available for us. Hence it appears both companies are prepared to bring it to their users with whatever version is the most current at the time. I would suspect through a new download to the program.

So if you are a RootsMagic users don't worry about being behind in the game. In fact I have been informed that... almost every feature I listed Legacy as adding (charting, source templates, home button on toolbar, editing from lists, etc) are features than RM has had for several years or more, in fact RootsMagic might be "ahead of the game".

Bruce is already working on the programming for RootsMagic 4 so nobody is sleeping over there. It appears the only one behind is ME, I better look at RootsMagic 3 because my facts might be from version 2. In fact the only version I own is version 1. So forgive me readers if I have lead you astray. Thats what happens when you report from a bias opinion because I have been a devoted Legacy user from day one.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day.

1 comment:

LSY said...

One difference that oftern gets overlooked (probably because it matters to so few of us) is a program's portability. I stuck with PAF for as long as I did simply because it ran from a thumb drive. After reading through your posts, I decided to test out some of the other programs and found that RootsMagic ran the best from a USB drive - Legacy was a complete no-go.
Navigating was also a big deal for me. I got used to using my arrow keys to move around in the various views. RootsMagic allows this; Legacy seemed very mouse-oriented.