MacFamilyTree 4 Charts Dazzle

These are my grandparents on my Mom's side and their parents. I was happily using Reunion 8 to track my family tree until I got a look at the beautiful charts that MacFamilyTree 4 produces. Wow!

Besides this kind of charting, you get instant web pages. If you have web space somewhere including .Mac, you can get your data up on the web fast! Here's my first attempt. Each person's name can be clicked to zoom into their information in detail like this 50% screen shot:

MacFamilyTree 4 feels like a young program. In fact it is. It's been built from scratch for the Mac OS X platform. It uses all the built-in capabilities of X like image resizing. There's a little slider that lets you view charts at any size with instantaneous and smooth expansion and contraction as you move the slider.

Being young, it has its moments but also has rough spots here and there. I'm guessing that you can learn your way around the rough spots and do great with it - and it's only $45. I recommend that you pop open the help right away because they give you a few getting started tips that will help you avoid a couple of the rough spots.

Right now this is the *fun* genealogy program and Reunion 8 is the *serious* genealogy program for Mac. I'll be using both for a while because fun is a priority for me. MacFamilyTree uses the GED 5.5 format rather than a proprietary data format. There may be some limitations to that, but it's also nice to know that everything you do in the program can be exported to GED format. Reunion 8 can export to GED as well but since that format isn't it's native format, you can't be sure everything will be exported.

I've entered about 40 records into MacFamilyTree and I must say that it's faster to enter into Reunion 8. But then, part of that is that I'm used to Reunion. And part is that Reunion has a few more data entry aids. It might make sense for me to enter data into Reunion and then export it periodically into MacFamilyTree when I want to print charts or post an updated family tree to my website.