Pennine Software XFamily Genealogy Package

X!Family is a complete rewrite in C++ of the popular !Family Genealogy package on the Acorn RISC OS Platform. It is currently at early Alpha stage, with much of the user interface visible, but none of the functionality to actually edit GEDCOM files yet added. A few more features remain to be added to this "readonly" version, before I add editing functionality. I find it useful as a browser, especially given the ability to have different views on the same tree and to look at multiple sets of notes at once. My typical usage at present is to run XFamily on a 21" monitor on my Linux box, while running !Family on the Acorn platform (which runs a lot more slowly) to actually make changes.

Significant advances from !Family 2.2x:

• Platform portable: being developed on Linux using a toolkit which also runs on other platforms, including Windows. Of course, given the imminent availability of a stable ARMLinux, it will run on your Acorn kit too :-)
• Compiled code is much faster - loads a 3000-person tree in seconds rather than minutes, and updates to a new current person many times faster than the old package.
• Supports multiple views on the same tree, each with a different "current" person.
• Can have many edit windows open at once on different people, not just the "current" person.
• Can open notes windows on any person, not just the "current" person, and can have as many as you like open at once.
• Can open notes windows for families/marriages as well as individuals.
• Can cut and paste between different notes windows.
• Can change the language of all the messages dynamically while running.
• Can change (as a compilation option at present) the font size used on screen to support maximum usability - I use a small font to get a useful amount of tree on an 800x600 laptop and usually a bigger font for comfortable viewing on a 21" monitor, although the small font is also useful when viewing a particularly complex tree even at 1920x1440.

Further new features are planned:

• Will deal with sources and repositories.
• Will allow more versatile wildcard searches in "Goto".
• Will allow multiple people with the same name in the tree.
• Will support multiple documents (more than one GEDCOM in memory) and will allow merging trees.

Some of these features won't be implemented until a full editing capability has been incorporated, but as much as possible will be added and tested before adding the capability to corrupt your GEDCOM.

Of course, the new package (currently under the "working" name of XFamily) will be open source, and distributed under the GNU General Public License. The current Alpha release is available as source code only (I found it impossible to maintain binaries for umpteen distributions versus several versions of FLTK) which compiles under Linux (I use several different releases of Mandrake between 8.2 and 10.1, on which it is fine). You may need to patch the make file for the location of your FLTK installation and the C++ libraries (which seem to move between distributions). I've also run XFamily under both Fedora and SuSe distributions. Get the source as a tarball via the downloads page. There is a user-manual after the style of the KDE desktop ones, which is also being mirrored on the site as "The XFamily Screenbook".

A zip of all the screenbook pages is also available for browsing offline.