There is a nice list of new RM8 and RM9 features at What’s New
One of the items is the following: Hover over color in pedigree and family view to see the color names
That is a very nice feature, and I think it could benefit from some very minor enhancements as follows.
The hover over a color block feature does not list the color. It only lists any text you have associated with the color. If you have not associated any text with the color, the hover over a color block feature doesn’t do anything. For example, the color green in my color set #1 is for individuals that I’m not related to but who are the spouse of someone I’m related to. Before I added text to the color green, hovering over a green color block didn’t say green and didn’t do anything at all. I think that many of the colors are so similar to other colors that the hover text should say green or whatever the color is. After I added Spouse of a relative to the color green in my color set #1, the hover properly displayed that text, but it still did not display green. I think the most helpful hover text in this case would be green - Spouse of a relative.
The feature works in Pedigree View and Family View but does not work in Descendant View or People List View. I think the feature would be a great addition to those views as well.
I agree with you and have been intermittently working on a batch populating of the color titles, appending the color name in parentheses for that very reason.
I suspect the Descendant view does not lend itself to fast generation of the Tool Tip for every block of color for the same reason that Hints are absent from it - too many. If somehow it could generate them only for the ones in view or for a block of 25 or 50 from the topmost person in the view, maybe speed would not be overly impaired.
The ‘on hover’ event for color was not working for me and I was thinking it must be an issue on mac when I realized that the test db I had open was created by drag and drop. It seems that all of the color coding sets get transferred with drag and drop but all of the text labels get lost.
I left a comment on the tools page to that effect. Seems like yet another example of why the new tool to delete all members in a group would be a better approach than drag and drop for splitting dbs.
[edit: @rzamor1 for your awareness. Let me know I need to report this separately.]
That’s the second new thing in RM9 that’s lost on drag and drop. The other one is that Associations are lost on drag and drop. I can’t remember if there are any other new things in RM9 that are lost on drag and drop.
Even if this is not added to RM as an enhancement, it seems as if users manually adding color names to the text names for the color coding blocks seems like a good “best practice” for the use of color coding in RM. As you suggest, it could be done with an SQLite script, but users can do it themselves manually. I still would rather see an enhancement.
Agreed. Also, auto prefixing the Colorcode set name with the colorcode set number would be helpful. The colorcode set number only, iirc, is available in criteria for search er al. It would be helpful if the set name was displayed.
That’s definitely needed, but I had a different idea about how best to display that information. Instead of doing it in the hover over, why not put it in the title bar for each of the top tabs for the main left People tab.
I did a mockup for Family View, but it would work just as well in Pedigree View, Descendant View, etc. And it wouldn’t just display the current color set. It would be a clickable dropdown box to change the current color set. That way, you could change the currently selected color set without needing to go into the whole color set dialog and then back out. And it would enable displaying the current color set even in those views that don’t presently support the hover over.
Drag n Drop supports all the colors being used on an individual, but the naming of the color code sets and color labels are not automatically included. That is to prevent loosing what could be setup in the existing database. Go to File, Import Data, Import Lists to import the color code sets.
