Genea is an open source Windows application. I followed this project since version 0.8, and reported the release of version 1.0. It offered GEDCOM export, but no GEDCOM import. I do think the developers had their priorities straight by implementing export first, and import later, but I also believe they should have labelled that version 0.9 and reserved 1.0 for the first version to offer both GEDCOM import and export. As it stands, that version is Genea 1.2, released on 2008 Feb 20.
Genea is a download of less than 2 MB. Once you start the installation program, it prompt you to choose between English and German. Once you’ve done that, you get to see the GNU General Public License, a recognised open source license. You can easily reread that license later, it is the file License.txt. It then suggests an installation folder, which you can change, and then asks you whether you want menu folder and whether you want a desktop icon.
The first time I started the program, it took its sweet time displaying any dialog or window. After about six or seven seconds, it popped up dialog asking me to specify a scanner source. Both sources were for the same scanner, and the box default to TWAIN driver listed on top, so I agreed with that.
The first thing I noticed when the program proper started is that it maximised its window to cover the entire screen. I resized it and close the window to start again. As I closed it, I noticed a delay and saw a splash screen for my scanner. I don’t know why Genea is messing with my scanner, but I don’t like it.
When I started the program anew, I saw that splash screen again, and Genea managed to annoy me by again asking me to select a driver, and maximising its screen again, despite the fact that I resized it. Then, when I try to open the help file by choosing Help | Manual, Genea tries to connect to Internet - without warning. Apparently, there is no help file, but some HTML help, they did not consider including it in the download, and do not think it worthwhile to warn me that they are about to connect to the Internet or why.
That’s four bad first impressions in less than two minutes.
The user interface uses common windows controls, but does not respect Windows user interface guidelines. I got my hopes up when I saw the F1 shortcut key next to the Help | Manual item, but those hopes where smashed when I browsed through the menu. The left-most menu is not called File but Program, and it does not offer the customary file handling menu items, but a menu item for the options dialog. Most of the menu items normally found on the File menu are on a Family Tree menu, but the import and export menu items are on the Data menu.
After browsing through all the menus, I still hadn’t found any reference to scanners. It took a bit more than just browsing through them to discover that there is an "Input Assistant" which does talk to scanners. Just why the program needs to mess with scanner even when I don’t use that and why it does not bother to remember my choice I still don’t know.
The options dialog mystifies me a bit. Apparently, Genea can connect to either a Firebird or a MySQL database. It default to Firebird. Genea uses a username and password to connect to the database. Both have already been filled in. I have a suspicion that it is not necessary for me as user to see either the username or password unless I connect to a database on some remote server, which is not common for desktop genealogy applications. Perhaps it will come in handy some day, but the truly mystifying bit is that both the username ("genea") and the password ("****") are already filled in. So what is my password?
There is a Help button on the dialog, but it does not seem to do anything. In fact, after viewing it a few times, the OK and Cancel buttons on the dialog did not do anything either. As it was impossible to get rid of the dialog, I had to kill and restart the program, and sit through its annoying "pick a scanner driver" and maximisation again. Turns out, that when you do click the help button soon after starting the program, it tries to connect to the Internet - again without warning - and when that fails, the program freezes again. You have to kill and restart the program, and sit through its annoying "pick a scanner driver" and maximisation again. Some further - immensely annoying - experiments confirm that other dialogs suffer the same issue - as soon as you choose "Help", the program hangs. Great help that....
The Input Assistant is a simple bitmap editing program not unlike Microsoft Paint. Its one distinguishing feature is that has a menu item for moving bitmaps into and out of your genealogy database. As Windows users already have a copy of Microsoft Paint installed, a simple File Open dialog box to move existing images into the database would have sufficed. There is an option to move images. That dialog offers the ability to move it to other "books" and "pages". Unsure what that means exactly, I fill in some number, and click Save - to be greeted by an Unhandled exception dialog box....
That was enough to make me decided to concentrate on the genealogy application proper.
Genea does not show the open database in the title bar. The only indication that a database is open is the text "Connected to database" in the status bar. Genea does not indicate which database is open.
Its menus and dialogs for creating a tree or adding persons are confusing. When you choose Family Tree | Create, Genea does not ask for a file name, but for a person and a label. When you choose to enter a person, you have to give a name, but when you give a name and choose "Save and Next" (there is no OK button), the dialog empties, and the data for the individual you just entered is nowhere to be seen anymore. Apparently, the idea of "Save and Next" is that you can enter one person after the other, but how much sense does that make when I do not enter them in a relation to another person?
Instead of allowing me to add a child to a father and mother, I have to enter a new person, and use that dialog to search for the father and search for the mother before saving the data. That is an unnecessary complex procedure.
There seems to be no person list that I can select a person from. I cannot select a person and bring up a dialog box to edit that individual, I have to choose Data | Edit Person and then enter the name of the person I want to edit. That is no way to work.
The 1.2 version supports GEDCOM import now, so I decide to import a GEDCOM file. I choose Data | Import and then select a GEDCOM file. So far so good, but when I choose OK nothing happens.
I try Open Additional Source instead. Something seems to happen, but I am not sure what. The hard drive spins a bit, but the program does not show any dialog or progress box. Three seconds later the title bar changes from "Genea" to "Genea (Not Responding). I later discover that I did not have to kill the program, that is was doing something and that it would eventually respond again, but what it was doing remains unclear. I see no program list, no database statistics, nothing to indicate anything has changed - if at all. When I try searching for a person, I only a get a dialog that apparently expects me to fill in an exact name. I did not mention it yet, but Genea does not have separate fields for the given name and the family name, just a single field for the complete name. I try a few things, and the program hangs again....
I decide to read the online help. The amount of documentation is disappointing. There is no manual, there is just a FAQ, and it contains no more than four short questions and answer. Short as it is, the FAQ has quite obviously still not been updated since version 1.0. Although version 1.2 supports both GEDCOM import and export, the FAQ still states that Genea does not support GEDCOM import. Then again, as things stand now, I am sorry to say that actually tend to agree with the outdated FAQ instead of the 1.2 release notes.
Another menu item, Family Tree | Load, also brings up a dialog for loading GEDCOM files. The dialog box is titled "Loading a Family Tree". It shows the list of persons in the file and asks the question "For which person from the Gedcom file do you want to load the family tree". It is impossible to select all, you have to select just one person.
I select a random person, and Genea starts loading data for that person. Once it is done, a single box appears in the program’s window. Going by the screenshots on the website, that box represents the individual I just imported in a graphical tree. Alas, not only did it import just one single individual, the import is also immediately followed by an unhandled exception messagebox....
I’ve tried hard to import data from a GEDCOM, I’ve tried hard to manually create a tree to export a GEDCOM, but whenever something seems at least partially successful, the applications crashes again.
The program acts like its own my system, messing with resources it does not need. It does not bother to remember my choices, completely ignores Windows user interface guidelines, comes without any kind of help file, does not warn the user when it is about to connect to the Internet, and it buttons stop working when it cannot connect to the Net. Such pervasive user-unfriendliness does not earn it any kudos.
Editing data is needlessly complex. The dialog boxes are confusing. There is no help file and the online help is out of date. Nothing works. Anything that seems to work is immediately followed by an unhandled exception, also known as a program crash.
This program is remarkably buggy and unstable. All kinds of innocent actions expose fatal flaws that necessitate killing and restarting the program. It is impossible to get anything done at all.
I did not remove Genea 1.2 before installing 1.4, and the install actually remembered my choices. The first impression is just as bad as before, it just does not crash as much anymore and the GEDCOM import seems to work. I say seems to work, because I still don’t get to see any data. I decided to test the presence of data by exporting all data to GEDCOM. This was slow, but it did produce a GEDCOM. That small GEDCOM lacks a GEDCOM version number and character set declaration, and the auto-split of names like "Jan de Boer" into "Jan de" and "Boer" is no reason to recommend Genea either. It is still impossible to get anything done though.
The Genea newsletter tells me version 1.4.1 is out. Stefan Kögl writes "You now have the ability to import and export images from/to Gedcom files.". Well, the GEDCOM import seems to kind of work now, so I checked out the Genea 1.4.1 GEDCOM performance for addition to the GEDCOM Import Speed overview.
The creators of Genea stopped active development in 2009. The Genea source code remains available on SourceForce. The link has been updated.
| property | value |
|---|---|
| product | Genea |
| version | 1.2 |
| organisation | Martin Unger & Stefan Kögl |
| website | Genea |
| price | free download |
| requirement | Win32 (Windows 95 or better) |
| note | |
| Verdict | User-unfriendly, confusing, unstable |
| Rating | Unusable |
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.