I have been leery about rejoining RM8, after having been a tester. I quit that after only a couple of months. However, after having upgraded to Monterey, I decided to give it another chance to see if there were any improvements from when it was first released. I have seen none. In fact I am noticing just about as many Access Violation Errors as I did as a tester. And, they don’t appear to be in any one specific area. However, being that most of what I am working on is in direct association with connecting RM8 with FamilySearch records that is where most of my issues are at this time. I have no less than 2 or 3 usually more every day. They are not with the same procedure. Sometimes, it is using the edit to change the French date to English, another time it is transferring one name from FS to RM.
Then when I am closing the program as suggested it doesn’t close properly. I then have to Force Quit. Although, I had some problems with the RM7, it was far superior to RM8 from my viewpoint. Although I have tried other softwares, I haven’t found anything that is as good as RM7 was. I am not at the point of quitting Genealogy for lack of decent program.
Unfortunately, RM 7 will no longer run on macOS Monterrey, or I’d probably try to go back to it. I have an old MacBook Pro that I used with RM 7, should still work, and at least not crash as often (it its too old to run RM 8). And I have a vintage Windows system running Windows 10 that presumably wouldn’t have as many issues with RM 8. However it has a pretty loud fan and will quickly turn my already too warm office into a sauna (we have A/C but I would also need a fan to get it into my office). I prefer quiet.
The other option would be to run Windows (to run RM8), or a previous version of macOS, (to run RM7) in a VM. However, I have had no luck with Parallels in the past (even now there are bits of it it I’ve been unable to remove), and now they want you to have a subscription; same with VMWare Fusion, which works great, but is even more costly as they target enterprise customers. VirtualBox is free, but when I was kicking its tires awhile back I was getting occasional crash reports that seemed to emanate from some daemon service even when I wasn’t actively using the app. And I would need to get a Windows license for that, just in order to run RM 8 in there.
I assume you are talking about the Mac version of RM7. Have you considered trying to run the Windows erosion of RM7 under full CrossOver? There is a 14-day free trial that you could experiment with, and although it then costs, you don’t need a Windows license.
NOTE - I only use it under Big Sur as Monterey doesn’t support my old Mac, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t be fine as the latest version of CrossOver supports High Sierra to Monterey, and on past experience one might expect them to ship a new version (that you would be entitled to upgrade to) when Ventura reaches GA.
My experience has been very good for the several years that I have used iTunes . RM7 is very stable and I leave it running for days, most of which time my Mac sleeps. I am a heavy user of the Family Search interface - I don’t use Ancestry Treeshare - and it just picks up when I sign into the Mac again the next day. (I’m still using RM7 as my production system, hoping that the performance of RM8 on the Mac will eventually become more usable.)
I had not heard of CrossOver. That seems like the cleanest solution, though I cannot think of any other Windows app that I’d really have any need to run. Of course, I would probably just install RM8. I have not seen reports it is unstable on Windows (but then there probably aren’t many running it with CrossOver).
For now I fired up my Windows system and was able to import my Ancestry trees with RM8. This should sync up to cloud eventually so I can see what I can actually do with Mac RM8. I was blocked because import from Ancestry doesn’t work for me except with trivial trees (it seems RM8 is sending too many ‘keep alive’ calls and Ancestry terminates the login session).
I have some stuff on FamilySearch so maybe I’ll see how TreeShare works with that.
In the end I’ll probably stick with FTM 2019 as my main tool.
Bruce’s mac RM7 is a custom wrapper from the crossover people and is better than buying crossover to make your own wrapper. however he pays big $ for this each time the yearly mac OS update appears and probably will stop that cash drain now that he thinks he has an acceptable mac version.
According to tech support there is no problem with file upload to ancestry but like you mine fail if I include media even in tiny files. RM seems to believe only a very few mac users have upload and access violations.
FTM 2019 will remain my master database and I will use RM8 only to identify data errors to be fixed in FTM.
According to tech support there is no problem with file upload to ancestry but like you mine fail if I include media even in tiny files. RM seems to believe only a very few mac users have upload and access violations.
Have you given us a small test file that fails to upload media yet? We would like to look at it.
It turns out that even having tree downloaded with media successfully (using RM8 for Windows), I still get Ancestry login session prematurely terminated when doing TreeShare sync, followed by AVE. I have a case opened for this, but am not optimistic about resolution.
I assume I would have same issues with upload, but that’s not my use case.
Wonder if there is some way to enable logging for RM8/Mac? I am seeing absolutely nothing in Console, and crash reports never make it there either.
And for some reason, one of the trees that I downloaded with RM8/Windows won’t go into TreeShare mode, only shows Upload/Download options.
Gave jackson a test file and he had no problems. Does not help the rest of us. Issue seems to be a failure by RM8 to stop bothering the api with server calls and ancestry just drops them to stop the bother.
I think I have to congratulate Rooty on his persistence and help to the rest of us. I got the impression from RM8 that I was alone in my Access Violation problems but it is clearly fundamental to the operation of RM8 on a Mac.
Sadly, I have invested a lot of time in RM7 and gave RM the benefit of the doubt. I guess I am going to have to shelve genealogy for the foreseeable future until this is sorted.
Thanks but my persistence is waning. Recovering from double cataract surgery I find FTM tiny text is now small but readable. When I can get prescription eyeglasses in a month I should be fine there and will see if RM8 gets cured or killed in a year. Should be another update and webinar by then.
The gedcom bloat issue killed my plan to cycle into and out of RM8 to use the data tools.
You can scale the display to make everything bigger (or smaller!).
mossvale,
There’s no need to give up on genealogy. Just get a program that works. There are some out there. Rooty has mentioned at least one of them.
Thanks for the encouraging words. I think like most, I would like to concentrate on the genealogy and less on reading up on IT workarounds.
To date, I have worked with original sources or online archives and have no interest in posting or synching with online databases. I originally moved to RM6 when I got a Mac and stuck with it until the latest version.
Does anyone have experience of porting from RM8 to FTM?
No, because you can’t “port” RM8 to FTM. Not in anyway possible. You can “transfer” your database from RM8 via GEDCOM. If you follow @Rooty’s recent threads, apparently he has discovered some bloating in the files when transferring, however GEDCOM is going to be your only option.
Many thanks. See you on the other side!
My display resolution is one step up from the default and I can use EasyRes to notch FTM up a little and back for everything else. However FTM will not display on higher resolution settings (MPB 14") and this of course distorts all other programs.
I moved from RM7 several years ago to FTM 2017 with little trouble but my database is fairly small (400 people…500 media items). RM8 has a gedcom bloat problem so that is currently not a good starting point.
I choose FTM because it was a native mac app recently acquired and fixed by MacKiev and offered the same excellent person edit view as RM7. Now FTM 2019 has just released an updated version. If you mention owning a previous version the price is $50 without proof. My wife had a very ancient FTM version and we got this price.
Here’s a thought that is almost heresy to mac users … buy a cheap pc and use it solely for your genealogical pursuits. It wouldn’t have to be a super powerful machine but it would open you up to several more good genealogy programs. Family Historian imports directly from RM7 and 8. Plus there are tons of utility programs that are not available to mac.
I’m not trying to convert you out of the mac community but it sounds like you already have windows experience. Or you could even run RM8 on the pc.
Oh my! I once suggested that a Mac user just test their problem file on a PC and that user nearly went apoplectic! Suggesting they purchase a Windows machine is is surely even worse than heresy!
I made my living on pcs and fully understand the Windows Experience. While an intel room heater pc is dirt cheap, few mac users would consider returning to Hell just to run one badly behaving program after residing in a user friendly and sane computer environment. A better approach is to use the best native mac functional genealogy program. FTM 2022 has the same excellent person view as RM7…8 AND everything works.