Pennine Software, having developed an interest in genealogy, started using Denis Howes' excellent !Family package. Everyone's requirements for a software package vary, so it is inevitable that a package written by someone else won't implement some features you want. The major feature I liked about !Family is that it runs on an Acorn platform ! As this is an open source package, it was predictable that Pennine Software would start to add features and change the interface slightly.
Following Denis' desire not to develop the package further, several users took on the task of maintaining the package, and Pennine Software was one - contributing the majority of the changes made to date. The current state of the package can be downloaded from this site (see the downloads page). For more details (and a screen shot) see the !Family page.
!Family is interpreted BASIC, and starts to become very slow for trees of over a thousand or so people on older Acorn hardware without a StrongARM processor. But as the basic interface is so nice, Pennine Software decided to do a complete rewrite in C++, with the aim of producing a package with major improvements, and capable of running on a wide variety of platforms - even on the execrable Windows platform :-) Unfortunately, no-one has ported FLTK to RISC OS, so RISC OS users will need to run ARMLinux (difficult) or keep a different architecture machine on their desktop to use this software.
The current state of this work is a usable GEDCOM browser which runs under Linux using the FLTK toolkit (which will also compile for Windows, but possibly not using a "free" compiler). Although a lot of the "editing" user interface is present, currently the code does not change any GEDCOM. Under the provisional name of XFamily, source code is available on the downloads page. For more details (and a screen shot) see the XFamily page.