Tech Forum

scion wrote:When I copy & paste from nFS, lots of garbage shows up--including incorrect parents on the sealing info. When I copy & paste from FamilyTree, I get . . . nothing! It doesn't do that. Neither is a viable option.

FamilyTree uses Flash and in most cases you can not select data in a Flash screen so you can copy and paste it. What I do if I need to copy some information from FamilyTree is to do a Screen Save and email that. To do a screen save, push the "Print Screen" button which is located one or two keys right of the F12 key on most keyboards. This will place a picture of the entire screen on the clipboard. Since this is an image you must paste it into an image program and save it as a jpg file before you can attach it to a email, it will not paste directly into an email. If you do not have PhotoShop or some other image editing program, you can always use "Paint" which is located in Start>All Programs>Accessories>Paint on Windows XP and Vista computers. Paste the image into the image editing program and then you can save the image, you can crop the image to just the information you need before saving in many image editing programs.

There are several free utilities that will automate the entire process so when you push the "Print Screen" key it automaticly saves the screen in a jpg file on your desktop. I use "Screen Shot Capture" to do this, it is a freeware program and works great, it even has the option to save a portion of the screen instead of the entire screen.

Thanks for the information, both about the hidden code showing & print screens with flash. Until everyone has access to the same info, this will be a problem. I find it easier to email info than to expect someone else to look up exactly what I did so we can discuss it. These sites do not lend themselves to searching very easily--one cannot compare all aspects of data from multiple individuals.

I'm seeing the Flash-based Family Tree at the labs site being very slow. While viewing a pedigree with 75 persons loaded and fewer than that on screen, just moving the mouse cursor around had about a second or two of lag, with my CPU maxed out. I sent feedback that the client side GUI needs some serious optimization.

While my computer is six years old, it's still plenty fast to run other Flash-based stuff very briskly. It's a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 "A" (Northwood, IIRC) with 1GB RAM (paging/swapping rates were flatline zero). RAM clock is 266MHz rate, which is slower than more modern hardware, but still not that terribly slow. OS is Mandriva Linux 2009.0 using Firefox 3.0.10 and Flash plugin 10.0.15.3.

Is anyone else seeing the GUI, particularly mouse cursor movement, being unusually slow with Family Tree?

Family Tree isn't as slow as newFamilySearch use to be. It would time out due to inactivity while supposedly "loading" the data. Good plan. Time out people after 10 or 15 minutes, but the data wasn't even available to look at yet. Family Tree and nFS are still absurdly slow, though. Both lack useful navigation tools to move around quickly, see 1/2 siblings, etc.

scion wrote:Family Tree isn't as slow as newFamilySearch use to be. It would time out due to inactivity while supposedly "loading" the data. Good plan. Time out people after 10 or 15 minutes, but the data wasn't even available to look at yet. Family Tree and nFS are still absurdly slow, though. Both lack useful navigation tools to move around quickly, see 1/2 siblings, etc.

The timing out at 10-15 minutes was server-side slowness. What I was mentioning today is client-side (user-side) CPU load. They're largely unrelated--except that you can sometimes trade one for the other.

I would hope the third-party applications would do a lot of local caching of data to eliminate much of the server-side slowness. Even the current Labs Family Tree eliminates a lot of server latency by caching data locally. As long as that can be done without making the client side too slow, then we'll have something fast enough to be fun to work with.

scion wrote:Until everyone has access to the same info, this will be a problem. I find it easier to email info than to expect someone else to look up exactly what I did so we can discuss it.

scion, don't know if this will help, but during recent beta testing I learned you can bookmark an individual in nFS using your browser's bookmark/favorite function... which means you should be able to email the URL to another nFS user so they can go directly to the person.

For example, here's the URL for Stillman Pond. If you click on it, you should be able to go directly to him:
https://new.familysearch.org/en/action/hourglassiconicview?bookid=p.KNYJ-BDX&focus=p.KNYJ-BDX&svfs=1

On the cut-and-paste issue, I've also found it a little frustrating that one can't cut and paste in much of FamilyTree (there are a few areas that allow it, though I'd have to check to see what they were). I use cutting and pasting pretty regularly in nFS.

Kathryn

I had understood that for deceased people, the PID (Person IDentifier) in newFamilySearch is unique to one specific deceased individual and is common among all nFS users, so sending another user the PID should suffice to identify an ancestor. Bookmarking works, but a PID is shorter than an URL.

As I think has been described earlier in this thread, the lack of ability to cut-and-paste in the current Family Tree is a result of Family Tree being implemented in Flash. I too hope to be able to cut-and-paste in whatever version of Family Tree goes into production. Another option might be to try some of the third-party applications that use the new Family Search API. Worst case, capturing a screen-shot into an image file and running OCR on the image file might be somewhat workable.

Interesting. Nameless folks criticize me for being critical of a program (nFS) that does not work properly. Why attack a person providing feedback on a beta program that does not work? And I *have* given lots of feedback to the website. However, there is no indication that anything useful happens to it. One volunteer was so knowledgeable about the workings of the program that she told me it cannot operate on a laptop--go buy a desktop. This insight came after being on hold long enough to have my phone battery die, so I called in again on another phone.

Anyhow, PID and bookmarks only work when the others with whom I am communicating have access to the same software. They do not. Remember that this is only rolled out to the LDS in most of the US. Given that most of my family is *not* LDS, the current program provides no apparent method to share data in nFS with other active genealogists in my family. Waiting is fine, but the clock is ticking here. I'm nearly out of the "older" generation who might make useful connections or readily separate fact from traditions.

Just as another option, there are several third party clients (RootsMagic, FamilyInsight, Ancestral Quest, etc.) that have access to the nFS data and might offer better options to format and share the information with others.

http://www.familysearch.org/eng/affiliates/index.html

Because I think the direction this thread has taken is a good topic for discussion, I've started a new thread (http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3148) to discuss the problem of sharing Family History data and to look for some possible solutions.

- Stephen