2010-09-11 Getting Started with StamboomNederland: Online Editing

StamboomNederland

online editing

projects

There are two ways to get data into a StamboomNederland project. You can either import existing data or enter it online. Editing a genealogy starts with creating or selecting a project from the Dashboard page, or if the list of project is already overflowing, from the projects page. You get to the Projects page by choosing the View all projects link on the Dashboard page, below the list of projects.

five views

StamboomNederland provides five views of your data. You can switch between those five views using the row of five purple button on the page. The five views are Dashboard, Genealogy, Persons, Facts and Sources. Oddly, the button for the Dashboard view is titled Home, as if it is the site's home page.

The Dashboard view shows your existing projects and latest changes. The Genealogy view is an editable graphical view.The Persons viewe shows individuals, the Facts view shows a list of facts, and the Sources view shows sources.

Adding Persons

StamboomNederland Persons view

To add a person, you need to go to the Persons view and choose the ADD PERSON button. For no particular reason at all, the button text is ALL-UPPERCASE. THIS DOES NOT ENHANCE READABILITY.

StamboomNederland Add Person page

When you choose the ADD PERSON button, StamboomNederland displays the Person Details page. There are a few things that you are likely to notice right away.
Firstly, just to get this out of the way, the page contains several spelling and translation mistakes; The on-page labels Firstname, Usual name and Preposition should be First name, Call name and Proposition respectively. Worse, Prefix should be postfix.
Secondly, the page does not fit within the browser window; to see all fields you'll need to scroll down. Even if you only want to enter a name, and no other details, you still need to scroll down to find the SAVE button.

StamboomNederland Add Person page scrolled down

There is plenty of room on a 1024 x 768 screen for all the fields on that page, but StamboomNederland does not use it very wisely. The user interface does not even account for the scroll bar it provokes; the scroll bar overlays the search option text In public projects (the next screen shot shows this).

call names and patronymics

The involvement of the CBG shows in the fields themselves. StamboomNederland does not only separate prefixes from surname, but also supports patronymics.
The order of the fields is less than logical. The call name field comes after the surname field and the patronymic field comes after the call name field. The call name field should come the first name field, and the patronymic field should come before the surname field. It is not hard to fix the layout by moving the field around. The most important thing is that those fields are there.

multiple calendars

The preceding screenshot shows that StamboomNederland supports four calendars; the Julian Calendar, the Gregorian Calendar, the French Revolutionary Calendar and the Jewish Calendar. I applaud this, and not just because it shows that StamboomNederland support the four calendars that may occur in GEDCOM files.
This StamboomNederland allows users to enter dates without having to convert these dates to the Gregorian Calendar first. What isn't so hot is that you have to navigate between multiple fields and use a pull-down menu every time you want to enter a data. It would be considerably more user-friendly if StamboomNederland had a date field that allowed direct entry of a full date, and offered this multiple fields input method as a handy fallback for calendars you're not familiar enough with to perform direct entry.

adding family

Once you've added a person, the Person page displays a few additional buttons: SHOW GENEALOGY, ADD CHILD, ADD PARENT and ADD PARTNER.

StamboomNederland Add Person page extra buttons

I experienced an unpleasant surprise when I tried to enter the place of death for Menno Harke de Boer; StamboomNederland refused to accept the full place name, because it is longer than 50 characters. That's ridiculous.

StamboomNederland refuses place name

Abbreviations of any part of a place name is bad practice. Genealogy applicationd should neither encourage nor necessitate the use of abbreviations.

I decided to abbreviate United States of America to USA, but it should not necessary to do so. Abbreviating any part of a place name is bad practice,. Genealogy applications should neither encourage nor necessitate the use of abbreviations.

parents

I decided to add the parents before taking a look at the graphical presentation. When I tried to enter Harke Meines de Boer, I encountered another an unexpected limitation; the dialog for the parent lacks a field to enter a patronym into. The call name and nickname fields are missing too.

StamboomNederland Add Parent dialog

StamboomNederland is remarkably slow.

slow

I was also unpleasantly surprised to note that saving the tiny amount of information in the dialog box took about five seconds. This was no fluke. In fact, saves got progressively slower; saving the data for the mother took about seven seconds. Saving the data for the partner took twelve seconds. Saving the data for their child child took a whole minute! StamboomNederland is remarkably slow.

partner

The dialog box for adding a partner does not fit within a 1024 x 768 browser.

StamboomNederland Add Partner dialog box does not fit

That the place field is missing suggests that this dialog box was never tested.

Such a technical issue is easily fixed by adjusting the fields within the dialog and can be forgiven in a 1.0 application. However, the genealogical blunder I noticed as soon as tried to enter the data is harder to forgive: the dialog box allows entering a date for the marriage contract, but does not allow entering a place!
The best I could do within this defective design was to enter the place name in the note field. That the place field is missing suggests that this dialog box was never tested.

StamboomNederland Add Partner Place Name field missing

genealogy

After entering the parents, partner and child, I click the the SHOW GENEALOGY button. To this command, StamboomNederland responded quickly. The resulting horizontally laid out family tree is somewhat unconventional, but not hard to understand or get used to:

StamboomNederland Genealogy view

Notice that patronyms are not displayed. You can click on any person to bring up an an edit dialog box, but that dialog box does not allow adding patronyms or nicknames either.

StamboomNederland Genealogy view with dialog box

StamboomNederland's editing capabilities consists of raw, unpolished, hurried version 1.0 dialog boxes.

unpolished

StamboomNederland's editing capabilities consist of raw, unpolished, hurried version 1.0 dialog boxes. It is possible to enter a basic name, but support for call names and patronyms is limited. Entering birth and death events isn't particularly difficult, but StamboomNederland refuses place names longer than 50 characters. while United States of America is 25 characters already. You can enter parents, partners and children, but the dialog box for adding a partner has incomplete support for adding the relationship; you can enter the type of relationship and the date, but you cannot the place. The graphical display does not support patronyms at all. On top of all that StamboomNederland seems to expect that you to go for a leisurely walk every time you ask it to save the data you entered into its dialog boxes; saving data is unacceptably slow.