Your Family Tree V1.2 Update Documentation Copyright 1988 MicroMaster Inc. 1289 Brodhead Road Monaca, PA 15061 (412) 775-3000 December 12, 1988 Version 1.1 (original release) of Your Family Tree for the Amiga contained a few bugs. (We THOUGHT we got ALL of them!) The most serious occurred when the data files were located on separate disks or sub-directories (as in the example on unlucky page 13). This prevented YFT from working properly with more than one data disk. A few other bugs were reported and a few were found while testing the corrections to V1.1, these have all been corrected. While we were at it, we added a few new commands (menu choices) to make using YFT a little nicer. Following is a list of corrections and improvements made to YFT since V1.1. Be sure to return your registration card so we may contact you when any new revisions become available. Owners of V1.1 may return their original YFT disk to be updated to V1.2 free of charge. 1) The dual drive bug is now fixed. Many related "bugs" (really trashed file problems) should also go away. Whenever the configuration paths were set to different disks (as the example on page 13 of the manual), the files were usually corrupted and strange results displayed when you tried to work with families or parents. If you had been using a single data disk or a hard disk your data files should be OK to use. If strange data appears (both people UNDEFINED in a family, deleted families in the reports, etc) you should create new data files and start over. We have tested this very carefully and in nearly every possible configuration, including moving data files around several disks and sub-directories. 2) A bug in the Notes has been corrected (same notes appearing on multiple people, and on people that never even had notes). We think this was related to bug number one (above). The notes are working correctly now. YFTNotes.TMP (temporary file used when editing notes) is now created on the NOTE PATH, along with the note files. YFT will ask for YFT: (or workbench) to load Ed, if YFT: or workbench is already in a drive (or you are using a hard disk), Ed will load without incident. 3) A bug that occurred only when entering a Reference ID, then mouse clicking on another field has been fixed. If you entered the ID then clicked on another field, later when you tried to Goto RefID or use this person in a family, you would get a RECORD NOT FOUND. 4) Dual Floppies: When closing files, you were asked to insert YFT into a drive, then insert the data disk, and then re-insert YFT. This disk swapping (about 6 swaps) has been corrected (eliminated). 5) THAT LITTLE WINDOW: The small window that opened on the workbench screen was intended to provide more detailed information about certain errors. Most users would never see anything in this window, so it has been removed. The extra information about errors (mostly to help us locate and help correct the problem) has been removed. 6) Most of the CLI commands, international keymaps, and printer drivers had to be removed from the YFT workbench disk in order to make room for this file and the 512K version of YFT (more about the 512K in item #10). You may copy the printer drivers or keymaps you need into the proper places on the YFT: disk, or you may use your own workbench disk for booting. ============================== And now on with the Good News: 7) Two new menu choices have been added to the Individual Window, in the GOTO menu. You may now Goto the First Record (individual) of the file or the Last Record of the file. The Records (individuals) are sorted by Reference ID. 8) Two new menu choices have been added to the Children Window, in the Scroll menu: Prev Eight and Next Eight. You may now move through the children eight at a time. If there are less than eight children in the selected direction, you will be shown whatever number of children remain in that direction. NOTE: When there is a large number of children in a family, YFT will take some time to read all their names and birth dates from the disk. Be patient!! This also applies when entering the Family Window and the Edit Marriage Window, YFT must read the personal information from the individual's record. 9) If you try to edit an Individual's data without first selecting Edit from the menu, you will now be warned, and the original data re-displayed. Also if you try to edit (enter) data on the individual window while there is no open data file, you will again be warned and the screen cleared. If you are reviewing a person's data and want to activate a gadget (text area) to scroll and read some info that was not displayed, the warning will still appear. You may move the warning out of your way until you are finished looking at the info, THEN select the OK in the warning box. When you select the OK of the warning box, the warning will go away and the data re-displayed on the screen. 10) A second version of YFT is now included, it is named YFTree512. This version of the program does not contain the reports. This will allow users with 512K of RAM to use Your Family Tree without getting the error "Not Enough Free Memory". With the YFTree512 you may do everything that the regular version does, except reports. If you get the "Not Enough Free Memory" error fairly often (mostly when adding children or families), you should use the YFTree512 to enter and edit all of your data. Use the regular version of YFTree to do minor changes to the data (editing an Individual's data) and to print out any Reports you want. If you select Reports from within the YFTree512 program you will be reminded this is the 512K version and to use the regular version for printing reports. It is suggested that you have a Megabyte of memory for YFT, things to run much smoother. 11) We have received some questions regarding the date format in YFT. The official date format is: DD MMM YYYY where DD is the two digits of the day of the month, MMM is the three LETTER abbreviation of the month (JAN, OCT, JUL, etc), and YYYY is the four digits of the year. The spaces (or some single character) must be between the Day, Month, and Year areas. In place of a space you may use a - or a /. The space, dash, or slash is ignored by the date sorting part of YFT, but YFT expects a space, dash, slash, or something to be there to skip over. If you do not follow the date format, children and family groups may not be sorted properly. You may use the 11 character date fields to say "Before 1920" or "1940-1945" or anything else, but if you do not follow the YFT format in the Date of Birth and Date of Marriage fields, things may not get sorted properly. We are planning to allow the user to select the date format in a future revision. 12) Some comments have been received regarding YFT missing gadget or menu selections. This is not a bug, but a safety trap to prevent you from getting too far ahead of the program (disk access slows it down) and selecting options that may not be appropriate for the situation. Work is already underway to speed things up and to make this delay (safety net) as invisible to the user as possible. We apologize for any problems caused by bugs in V1.1, and we will do our best to correct any bugs found in Your Family Tree. We are planning many improvements to Your Family Tree and your suggestions are welcomed. Major areas targeted for improvement in V2.0 are the Search, Reports, and the user manual. MicroMaster Inc. would like to thank all of you who called or wrote in with bug reports and suggestions. Most of the suggestions could not be included in this update since its primary purpose was to correct bugs. Your ideas and suggestions are under consideration for V2.0. We welcome your comments, good or bad about our product. With your input we can continue to improve Your Family Tree and provide you with a high quality, powerful, and easy to use Genealogy database. So if you have any suggestions for changes or improvements, please write to us. It is better to write with your comments and suggestions, this keeps our phone lines open for customer support and new orders. Michael A. Pasterik Project Manager