Are those Microsoft guidelines available online? I would be very curious to see them, and not just in the context of RM.
I agree, keyboard shortcuts are good for arthritic fingers
JD
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Not wanting to hijack this thread, and this is sort of in context, but I really wish RM8 developers would allow everything to be copied and pasted to anywhere. “Anything from anywhere to anywhere” is my desire for a new piece of added functionality.
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Hello emkaysmith, I am with you in terms of adding keyboard shortcuts to RM8. I enjoyed your comment about the TRS-80, I purchased mind in 1979 and had a lot of fun playing around Basic and developing simple little routines.
RSA-1 rsajr1@bellsouth.net
I taught myself line-numbered TANDY BASIC and wrote a number of adventure-type games for my kids. The adventure guy was a double-asterisk that moved sloooooooowly through the dungeons (made up of straight lines) on the b/w monitor. My oldest son was 13 and really got into it, to the extent that he learned BASIC himself. He’s been head of IT for a large Texas banking company for the past 15 years.
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I hear you, but I’ll bet it’s not easy to find developers willing to work on something like RM.
And the costs! what does RM cost $49? The software I used to work on would set you back 7,000 per seat. I admire the fact that they are still in business at all.
I too am a senior citizen trying to be positive about this upgrade. I HATE to constantly pick up the mouse to click when previously I could hit enter or tab. Data entry takes way longer than it did in RM7 and I am using a relatively new laptop with SSD drive and 16 gig or RAM. Also the program is really slow for most data entry. I used to simply hit “d” to bring up a box to add a death fact and now that same action caused me to have to correct 94 entries where it chose “adoption” rather than death.
I have used Bruce’s programs since Family Origins and found them easy to use for new users as well as old. Now, I don’t know what I will suggest for newbies to genealogy. I suggest that RM 6 or 7 be available for purchase at a reduced price for people beginning to do genealogy research. While those of us with years of researching using the computer will likely adjust over time and probably come to like RM8, this will not be an easy program for a newbie to learn The wonderful intuitive nature of the older formats is gone.
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There’s a difference between software that you will use to earn income with and software for hobbies. I have several kinds of editorial software that cost me $500-$800 apiece – but I make money with those and they also come off my taxes. No one is paying for RootsMagic but me.
I was a member of the design and beta team for The Master Genealogist back in the '90s, working with Bob Velke behind the scenes at Dick Eastman’s Roots forum at CompuServe. That was originally a DOS program, so no mousing around, of course. (I’m not a coder, just an experienced end-use designer.) All of us on that team were – first and foremost – experienced genealogical researchers, so we concentrated on what we knew the users were actually going to NEED and WANT. And Bob (who wasn’t nearly as experienced at the actual research) made it happen.
TMG finally died a few years ago when Bob’s health gave out and a great many of us wandered in the wilderness for awhile, but most of us finally went with RM – and not in small part because its developers took (I won’t say “stole”) a great many of their ideas from TMG. A couple hours of use of RM7 made that very obvious. It took me a couple of months to adjust my work patterns to the differences in RM, but I expected that.
I’ve been working on sorting out an extended family this week using RM8 (so I guess I’m committed to it), and my patterns are slowly adjusting. But, as you and everyone else keeps pointing out, data entry is taking FAR longer. Too many damn buttons to have to click. Things I used to be able to do with two or three keyboard shortcuts are now taking me six or eight mouse clicks, and often having to re-select the same buttons and repeat the same steps instead of doing (say) entry of basic facts for a family of kids in a batch.
Why can’t I just hit ENTER to say “yes, do this thing”? Why can’t I even double-click the mouse on a selection, instead of having to select an option and then go find the button and click that? Why can’t I do cumulative searching on most of the lists for a person or a source (where it zeros in on what you want as you type) instead of having to use the stupid search box – and then you see only the single result of that search, and not all the surrounding items, one of qhich might turn out to be what you really needed?
Windows has had a long time to develop and all Windows apps have a large number of things in common where the user is concerned. That’s one of Microsoft’s biggest marketing points – that you can learn one set of shortcuts and apply them to EVERY application. RM’s developers seem not to understand basic marketing at all.
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Philirons – I agree with Chris, “Well said.” I also remember those days with Word Perfect and only keyboard shortcuts. They were a nightmare for me because people were constantly losing the overlay.
Some of the keyboard shortcuts we know and love may one day be included in an upgrade to RM8. The less popular ones and those not compatible with the new software will be dropped. This is the price of progress. Always has been, always will be. (P.S. I typed this elsewhere and used a keyboard shortcut to paste my reply here!)
emkaysmith – You make me feel sooooo old. The first computers I worked on were analog machines that belonged to the USAF. This was in the late 1960s. I envied my college professors who had access to digital programmable computers.
My first “real” machine was a DEC PDP-11 running UNIX version 3.x. I remember when the Trash-80 came out, I wanted one so much but decided to hold off until the IBM-PC became more popular.
I’m glad I did. I could easily FTP all my UNIX files to an IBM-PC our company purchased which allowed me to use genealogy software for the first time.
Although learning to use a mouse and Windows was a real trial for a died-in-the-wool command-line geek like me, I knew it was the way of the future. Still, it wasn’t until Win-95 that I really got the hang of it.
I retired long ago. Today, my wife and I own desktops, tablets, and smart phones. I manage my own websites for genealogy & family DNA research. New tech and software is still a pain. The learning curve is always steep.
I agree with you. This is a generational thing (I can’t speed type with my thumbs either). I also agree that, “There ought always to be several ways available to do almost anything.”
Our RootsMagic team is overwhelmed right now. A good friend of mine can’t even purchase RM8 because their servers can’t handle the credit card load. He had to mail them a money order.
I think if we exercise patience and keep letting them know the keyboard shortcuts most of us want, they will eventually include them. At the same time, we can’t expect them to provide every want from every user ASAP. Upgrades take time.
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He obviously doesn’t do real work if he thinks a phone is all you need.
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I like to use keyboard shortcuts too. It’s fast. But I also mouse lot. My main problem with the shortcuts that are available is they often don’t follow the windows conventions and that makes them useless. Add in an ability to block and copy anything on the screen.
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Rember Multiplan and early Lotus 1-2-3 and their quick access to the menus by using the / character? I could type /fs a lot faster than I could pick it out with a mouse.
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Microsoft guidelines that I referred to are PDFs here:
Microsoft Windows User Experience https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=626098 and
Windows keyboard shortcut keys Keyboard - Win32 apps | Microsoft Docs
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