| Features: |
|
| Photo and File Management: |
|
| Web Integration: |
|
| Ease of Use: |
|
| Ease of Installation: |
|
| Customer Support: |
|
| Value for Money: |
|
| Overall Star Rating: |
|
This is undoubtedly the most overly complicated, unintuitive, and user-unfriendly software ever! This is coming from someone who comes from a high-tech background, including programming, and has decades of genealogy experience behind me (would that be a pun?).
The one problem with open source software is that because it's not actually a company, there is nobody at the helm steering the ship, so the result in this case is the ship being lost at sea. They even tell you that it's not advisable to simply start using the software, that you need to read the manual beforehand (not really a manual as it's only available on-line). So, after a three hour tour, I was lost at sea.
A second problem with open source software is that the technical writing is generally horrible. The problem is it's written by programmers for programmers instead of as a tutorial for the end user.
What they have apparently done is pirate the GEDCOM standard and transmogrified it into something unrecognizable by other well-established genealogy programs. They even have the audacity to plainly state right in their own literature that the process of importing your old GEDCOM, especially if it's a large file, WILL cause loss of data!? Not might. WILL. Who wants that?
Basically, this is something Microsoft has done in the past, which is hijack someone else's software and change it arbitrarily to make it their own, thus making users dependent upon their version. At any rate, all I wanted to do was import my GEDCOM file. It would not import. It would just sit their with the little blue circular ribbon of death going round and round. There is supposed to be a progress bar, but I never saw it. I left it alone for two hours, but still nothing. I tried changing various preference settings, but to no avail. I then tried to start a family tree with just me, then import as they suggest, but I could not even get that to work. I would create the new file, but then it would tell me the database was locked and that I had to use the force-unlock feature, but there was not link to it--nor could I find a drop down menu with that name.
So, after messing around with this for over a day now, I uninstalled it. I highly recommend even experienced users avoid the frustration of attempting to use this for the purposes it was allegedly designed for--and certainly newbies should avoid this at all costs.
In summary, I would not recommend GRAMPS Genealogy Software to a friend.
|
