I continue to perform the exact same tasks on the exact same people in RM7 and RM8 to compare and contrast. I continue to encounter many small things in RM8 that are harder than they should be and that might be amenable to a fairly easy fix.
Here’s an example that I’m currently working on. This is real data from my production database. For reasons that don’t matter to this discussion, I need to delete these people from my database. Here are two things that make it harder in RM8 to delete the people than it needs to be.
- The easiest way to do these deletes in both RM7 and RM8 is usually to do them in Descendant View. RM8’s indentation in Descendant View is a little different than RM7’s indentation in Descendant View. I need to delete the spouses - the people with the + sign - before the people in the main line. RM8 indents spouses the same as siblings. RM7 indents spouses more than siblings. So it makes it harder in RM8 to be sure I’m deleting the spouses first. It should be easy in RM8 to indent the spouses a little bit more so they stand out more from the siblings. For example, look at Sara Elizabeth Holt and the two spouses Frances E. Hoskins and Julia Ann Lodema Hoskins in my attachments. They stand out as spouses much better in RM7 than in RM8.
- In RM7, the Delete key serves as a hotkey in any of the main views of people and it defaults to Delete Person. The Delete key is easier than the mouse and it avoids the popup that asks if I want to Delete Family or Delete Person. RM8 does not support the Delete key in this manner in Descendant View. Not supporting the Delete key in Descendant View makes RM8 much clickier than RM7 to perform this task and it makes RM8 take much longer than RM7 to complete this task. It should be easy in RM8 to support the Delete key for deleting people in Descendant View and to have the Delete key default to Delete Person without there being a popup that asks about Delete Person vs. Delete Family.
I’m aware that I can do these deletes in RM8’s Family View and that RM8’s Family View shows a spouse and that the spouses are clearly distinguished from the siblings. And RM8’s Family View does support the Delete key without requiring a popup that asks about Delete Person vs. Delete Family. So obviously it’s possible in RM8 to support the Delete key. But when I’m doing these kinds of deletes, it’s nearly always multigenerational and I really do need Descendant View rather than Family View.
Finally, it doesn’t impact the process of doing the deletes, but I find the left arrows in RM8’s Descendant View to be awkwardly placed and very hard to use. RM8’s left arrows in Descendant View are embedded in the middle of the data. I think that left arrows should be at the left of the data and right arrows should be at the right of the data. The left arrows in RM7 are at the left of the data as they should be. They are also a solid red color so they stand out much better than do the very weak left arrows on the RM8 screen.
P.S. I actually did the deletes for the spouses and children in RM8 just now in Family View as described. I deleted the spouses first, and then the children. That left William Scarbrough Freels and Maria Louisa Tunnell as parents without children, just like I wanted. Doing it that way was a much more pleasant experience than doing it in RM8’s Descendant View because the Delete key worked just fine. It really was just as nice as doing it in RM7. Except that there really are additional deletes involving other generations that I needed to do, so I highlighted William Scarbrough Freels and switched back to Descendant View.
RM8 then did this crazy thing it does when you switch views where it switches to a totally different family, totally unrelated to my current project. In theory, it was going back to the way Descendant View was the last time I was in Descendant View. I hate the feature anyway, but if the feature is going to exist it should at least work correctly. The last time I was in Descendant View, the Primary Person in Descendant View was the mother of William Scarbrough Freels, namely Nancy Scarbrough.
You can see that when I did the screen capture of the people I was going to delete that William Scarbrough Freels was in the second generation. That’s because his mother was the Primary Person. So if this feature was going to work correctly, you would think it would make Nancy Scarbrough be the Primary Person in Descendant View when I switched from Family View back to Descendant View. But instead, it made Alva Edward Peters the person in the Primary Position in Descendant View. RM8 had totally lost my place in the database.
RM8 loses my position very regularly like this because I change views a lot. I wish the new feature would just go away and that RM8 would make the highlighted person into the Primary Person in the new view when switching views. But if it’s going to try to go back to the way the view used to be, it at least should do it right. And I really won’t be happy until the old behavior of following a person around between views is restored, at least as an option. So what I really want in this situation is that when I have William Scarbrough Freels as the highlighted person in Family View (and he is even in the Primary Position) that he then be in the Primary Position when I switch back to Descendant View. This thing where RM8 loses your place on a regular basis when you switch views has to be one of its very worst features.