Louis Kessler's Behold has been in Beta for years. A month ago, Behold came out of Beta with the release of Behold 1.0.
Real-Time Collaboration announced AncestorSync in May.
The first Public Beta of AncestorSync for Geni became available in June.
After a few betas, things got quiet.
There has been no new beta for months.
Real-Time Collaboration plans to release another Beta before the end of the year.
Ancestry.com introduced TreeSync, the Family Tree Maker 2012's feature, through a Public Beta.
Family Tree Maker 2012 was released at the end of September.
A small surprise, revealed early in September, was the new Family Tree Maker Complete bundle.
The first Service Pack was released early in December.
The Public Beta for Family Tree Maker 2012 (for Windows) was followed by a separate, and fairly public, Beta for Family Tree Maker 2012 for Mac.
Its oddly incorrect official name is Family Tree Maker for Mac 2.
It was released mid December.
In January, Ancestry.com released its Ancestry app for Apple's iPhone and iPad. In September, development of the Android variant was so far along, that Ancestry invited Beta testers. Ancestry seemed to be going for a Private Beta, but the Beta releases were publicly available in the Android Market, so it ended up being a Public Beta. Ancestry for Android is out of beta now; Ancestry.com just announced the official release of Ancestry for Android.
The much-delayed New FamilySearch (NFS) has been in Alpha (LDS members only) for a few years. In February, FamilySearch started a Limited Private Beta. You may have heard it is in public beta, because one of their non-technical employee bloggers promptly misreported it as a public beta. New FamilySearch, now known as FamilySearch Family Tree, is still in Limited Private Beta. The release date for a Public Beta continues to be Real Soon Now.
Quite a few new applications and features were made possible by genealogy APIs.
These APIs are fairly new, and continue to be tweaked, and that is one reason the next beta of AncestorSync has been delayed so much.
Geni.com introduced the Geni API late last year.
MyHeritage followed Geni's lead, with a MyHeritage.com API first revealed in MyHeritage Family Graph API.
The MyHeritage APIs is read-only and still in Beta.
Apps like Ancestry for Android make it obvious that there is an API for Ancestry.com, but the Ancestry.com API remains private.
The SearchService for Family Tree Maker revealed in Family Tree Maker SearchService is hardly the Ancestry.com API.
FamilySearch is working on GEDCOM X as replacement for GEDCOM.
GEDCOM X is more then a file format.
Its Java sources define a de facto GEDCOM X API.
GEDCOM X has not even been officially announced yet, but the project was revealed in GEDCOM X.
The Family Tree API used to be available to registered developers only, but became made publicly available in December.
Ancestry.com's new Content Publisher Programme revealed in Ancestry Content Publisher Programme was in Private Beta with the San Diego Genealogical Society before being introduced publicly.
Wholly Genes released a Public Beta of the The Master Genealogist in May. They released just one Beta, and then fell silent. TMG 8 was released this month.
During most of the year, the Vele Handen (Many Hands) project was in Private Beta. The new crowd-sourcing platform was officially introduced on 2011 Nov 3.
The above isn't a complete list of all genealogy betas. There are many private betas. For example, RootsMagic did not organise a public beta for either Personal Historian 2 or RootsMagic 5, but released both after private betas.
There were more public genealogy betas this year than ever before. Noteworthy is that there were several public from Ancestry.com. The public beta of Family Tree Maker is of particular interest to consumers, as Ancestry.com still doesn't provide trial or lite editions of their desktop genealogy application like other vendors do.
Neither Ancestry.com nor Wholly Genes seems comfortable with the idea of public betas yet, but there are several genealogy product vendors that regularly release public betas of their upcoming releases. Some of the better known ones are Synium with MacFamilyTree, Nigel Button Software with The Complete Genealogy Reporter, and Northern Hills Software LLC with the Pocket Genealogist.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.