Every year, vendors announce new products and new versions of existing
products. Vendors rarely announce the discontinuation of existing products.
The serious genealogy vendors take several years to develop new major versions,
and may or may not release updates in between. So, we are often not even sure
whether a product is still being maintained or not.
Here's a quick overview of a bunch products about which I am pretty sure that
these have been discontinued.
There seems no doubt that Family Tree Maker Classic is officially dead. Ancestry.com replaced it with New Family Tree Maker in the form Family Tree Maker 2008 on 2007 Aug 14. That is more than three years ago already, yet Family Tree Maker Classic is still very much alive. New Family Tree Maker is such an awful and generally disappointing product, that many users switched back to Family Tree Maker 16.
The last minor update to Personal Ancestral File (PAF) happened back in 2002.
FamilySearch did not announce that they had abandoned PAF. On the contrary, they
continued to promote PAF on the FamilySearch home page - a prime advertising
position. FamilySearch stopped PAF on 2010 December 21; FamilySearch replaced
their site with a new design, which no longer features PAF on the home page.
FamilySearch promoted PAF for decades. PAF is still one of the most
popular genealogy applications, perhaps even the most popular genealogy
application, and its users are not all suddenly going to switch to something
else merely because FamilySearch stopped promoting it.
Almost immediately after FamilySearch stopped promoting PAF, Incline Software released Ancestral Quest Basics, a free edition of Ancestral Quest. PAF has always been so similar to Ancestral Quest, that many PAF users are likely to switch to Ancestral Quest Basics.
Users were already complaining that Pearl Street Software had abandoned its
paying customers using their Family Tree Legends software when the owners put
Pearl Street Software up for sale in early 2006. In 2007, MyHeritage announced
that it had acquired Pearl Street Software and all its assets. MyHeritage mainly
bought Pearl Street Software for its GenCircles data and
its SmartMatching technology.
MyHeritage was mostly interested in SmartMatching™, and may also have been
interested in Real-Time Internet Backup and Real-Time Internet Publishing, but showed
little interest in Family Tree Legends the product. MyHeritage has included SmartMatching in its own Family Tree Builder and continues
to promote that
product.
Pearl Street's website is still running and Family Tree Legends
product can be downloaded for free. The downloads page now notes that Family
Tree Legends is now 100% FREE!
and provides a free serial number that everyone can use: 1A752-42184-B74A3-AD752.
The version offered is Family Tree Legends 5.1.5.1, dated 2005 Jul 27.
On Windows Vistas, installation succeeds, but the application fails to run, because it cannot find MSVCP60.dll, the Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 runtime library. That run-time library should have been included with the application. This DLL and other DLLs many applications needs can be downloaded from several sites. If you copy MSVCP60.dll into the Family Tree Legends program directory, it starts just fine.
DynasTree Home Edition, originally known as It's Our Tree Home Edition is a product of Verwandt.de. You can still download and install, but you should not expect any version. MyHeritage bought the OSN Group, and promotes its own Family Tree Builder product.
The Home Edition is not really product of Verwandt.de anyway. It is rebadged edition of Ahnenblatt, a multilingual German application by Dirk Böttcher. The Home Edition is the worst edition of that application ever. It isn't Ahnenblatt Lite, but Ahnenblatt Anorexic. The full application is much better, and continues to be available as shareware. There even is an English-language site.
Deudos Family Tree is a multilingual genealogy application from Spain. It used to be available from www.deudos.com, but the Deudos website is gone. Deudos Family Tree version 5.1.274, build on 2005 Sep 10, seems to be the last version ever. You can still download this version from many shareware sites.
…the GenDesigner 3.0 Beta is all that has been available for more than half a decade
Officially, the current release of GenDesigner is version 2, because version
3 is still in beta. However, the GenDesigner 3.0 Beta is all that has been available for
more than half a decade. It is not usual for an application to be withdrawn just before a
major new release, but GenDesigner 3.0 Beta 2 released on 2004 Feb 4 seems to be
last version ever.
This version is still available from the GenDesigner web site.
CyberLab WinAhnen is a German genealogy application. The website suggest the
latest major version is version 5, but when you do download and install it,
you'll find that you have WinAhnen version 6.51.
That may give you hope
that the application is still being maintained and that the website is merely
lagging behind the application, but the setup program is dated 2007 Feb 8, and the
application itself is dated 2006 Nov 29.
This application has not seen a minor update in more than four years.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.