!Family is an editor for Genealogy (Family Tree) Databases working directly with the internationally standardised GEDCOM file format. It has an intuitive visual interface using which details of families, people and events can be browsed and edited directly on a graphical view of the family tree. It has evolved from Dennis Howes' !Family, a BASIC program for RISC OS computers which is great to use, but getting very slow on old machines with a big database.
!Family will be rewritten in C++ shortly (a version for Linux using the FLTK toolkit is already running with limited editing capability). Using a compiled language will make it much faster than an interpreted one. !Family is released under the GNU General Public License. See Appendix C for details on obtaining the latest versions of !Family (or X!Family and FLTK), compiling, porting and installing.
At present, !Family is fairly mature, but is still undergoing development. At any time you should be able to obtain a well-tested and stable "release" version, and an up-to-the-minute, but potentially unstable development version. Shortly, you should expect to see two more versions for RISCOS - a stable compiled C++ program (faster than the BASIC one, but initially with rather limited functionality) and the alpha testing version of the development C++ code. The BASIC versions are not crunched, so effectively come with source. The C++ versions will have separate source and binary releases.
Currently (2000-12-19) the alpha development version of the BASIC !Family is being used to develop the Templates for use with the C++ program, so the user interface is changing somewhat. Expect the C++ version to appear very similar to the alpha BASIC version, but run faster and use somewhat less memory.
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