Software, good software and not this FTM junk is designed so that ERRORS are TRAPPED and an automated recovery process is provided. An amateur genealogist wants to expend time on his HOBBY and not have to spend hours becoming proficient with recovery mechanisms for poorly designed software. And FTM is poorly designed. John did you bother to read that “Solution” you so smugly provided? I develop software for a living and I can tell you from experience that well-designed software contains AUTOMATED ERROR RECOVERY processes. You see John, A few years back PCs weren’t being sold because they were difficult to use. people simply avoided them. The PC world faced a dilemma: how could they make computers accessible to everyone? The industry underwent a revolution we called “PLUG and PLAY”. The idea was simple: when a person buys software they can either download or insert a disk/cdrom/dvd into their computer and by magic, the software is loaded and operational. When something breaks, the software senses the problem and should provide an automated recovery mechanism… like when the FTM sync fails. Only FTM doesn’t fix the problem they merely tell the user “You go fix it” and eventually,this requires MERGING two trees. You see John, the software world realized you couldn’t sell software that wasn’t “Bulletproof” and now, software developers have huge libraries of code available to monitor everything in the computer and something as trifling as file sizes and merge operations are automated. Competent software developers design these kinds of mechanisms into their programs every day. FTM decided that rather than fix the sync process, they would force users to perform a tedious and complicated manual process culminating ina MERGE requiring their users to expend hours on what should be an automated process. A sync error should be “REPAIRED” with a simple utility but then FTM doesn’t care to provide this to their customers. So now some poor guy who just wants to trace his family roots spends two days trying to merge two trees while ancestry.com charges $25 a month for access the guy can’t use. I now have TWO of the same family tree in Ancestry.com; two files on my computer with different names and not sure which one is actually the "correct" one. I have no idea which tree, if any, is sync'd as I HAVE TWO TREES WITH THE SAME NAME on ancestry.com. And all I wanted to do was trace the family roots. Tomorrow, I will cancel the ancestry.com membership and move on to something else or maybe not. I do software for a living and I don't want to come home and have to debug bad code. BTW John, the sync feature is what FTM states is their big advantage over the competition. So what is the advantage when sync is no longer useable? I am dead in the water and have no desire to expend anymore time fixing issues that I had no control over and FTM offers no support at all.
↧