Cool Tech Reviews

Microsoft really, really wants students to buy Microsoft Office and to that end today started a promotion where students can pick up Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95:

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The news that Symantec was working on a anti-botnet protection tool was fine and dandy except for the fact that they want an additional $29.95 yearly subscription. If you are beginning to wonder how many different security programs Symantec can think up to separate you from your cash, so is Ryan Naraine:

The anti-botnet tool is being marketed as “complementary solution to existing antivirus or security suites,” adding yet another application to the list of security tools needed by PC users to avoid computer takeover attacks.

Here’s a list of the products sitting on your machine, sucking valuable system resources under the guise of protecting you from hacker attacks: Anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, anti-spam, drive-by browser protection, etc., etc.

It has to be the biggest con job in IT to convince consumers that they should pay a separate subscription for each of the above “protection” products.

$29.95 here and $29.95 there - sooner or later it adds up to real money.

No, Microsoft isn’t going into the genealogy software business. It’s just that they badly want developers to use the facilities of the new Windows Presentation Framework (WPF, codename “Avalon”) that shipped with Windows Vista to create spiffy new graphics programs. To that end they are providing a variety of demo programs and:

Today, in collaboration with Vertigo Software, I’m pleased to announce the launch of a brand new end-to-end reference sample for WPF. Available for download immediately, Family.Show is a genealogy explorer that allows you to create or import a family tree and explore, annotate or save it to XPS.

We’ve shipped the source code for a number of demos before, but the bar for a reference application is somewhat higher. The goal here is to show best practices for the construction of an application and to try and include as much reusable code as possible that others can use both to understand the framework and to “borrow” for a real application.

(XPS is the XML Paper Specification, a document format like Adobe PDF that Microsoft also introduced with Vista.) Still using Windows XP? Not to worry - you get much of the WPF functionality and all you need to run Family.Show just by installing the .NET Framework version 3.0 on XP - it’s available at the above link.

Family.Show is a good idea for a demonstration program since most genealogy programs are understandably heavy on their database attributes, but usually light on the graphics which can get quite complex.  The use of WPF allows Family.Show to provide a really nice graphical explorer interface for family trees and it will import (and export) standard GEDCOM files so you can load it up with the data from whatever genealogy program you are using now and give it a spin. If you want to start from scratch building your family tree, Family.Show is fully capable and easy to use as the demo video illustrates.

Bottom Line:

I would have to say that Family.Show seems remarkably full featured for a demo program, but I did have some problems with it losing relationships in my personal GEDCOM file. For that reason and questions of long term support, I don’t recommend that you shift all your family records over to it, but it is still a neat way to browse around.