I use RM’s Desscendant View a great deal anyway, and I use it even more in RM8 than in RM7 because I find RM8’s Family View so lacking in showing the information I need. However, RM8’s Descendant View has a problem in that the spouses are not indented. So if you have a couple and their children, the spouses of the children are not indented from the children themselves. At a casual glance, it looks like all the spouses are actually children and it’s hard to see which children have spouses and which do not.
I’m including a screenshot of the same individuals in the same Descendant View in RM7 and RM8 to illustrate the problem. My intent was to use Daisy Prosise and her two husbands Tony and W. Baker Wallace as the example. But I also wanted to show a few additional people above and below Daisy and her husbands to provide some context. Therefore by accident, I also captured Effie L. Prosise at the top of the capture. It’s easy to recognize that she is a spouse in the RM7 capture but not so easy to recognize that she is a spouse in the RM8 capture.
So I really wish the spouses could be indented a bit in RM8’s Descendant View. I don’t think it would be hard to do at all, and it would make RM8’s Descendant View much easier to use.
I guess I am not really seeing this. In both cases, the spouse placement is exactly the same in relation to the child that they are married to. However, I will agree that RM8 is so much more annoying to read with the colored blacks and general layout. My problem is that the children are not indented as deeply in RM8 as in RM7, in terms of letters. For example the D in Daisy is lined up under the ‘t’ in Cynthia in RM8 but the ‘D’ is clear over under Cynthia’s middle name in RM7. This makes it much hard for me to see what I want at a quick glance. I am also more in favor of the grid in RM7 than the left side lines in RM8.
I agree that the name Daisy aligns with the name Tony in both cases, which is what I think you are saying. But the alignment of the names in RM7 is not what provides the needed indentation to separate the child Daisy from the child’s spouse Tony. Rather, it’s the child Daisy’s generation number 3 as compared to the spouse Ton’y’s code of + to indicate that he is a spouse.
The color blocks also contribute to the problem of making the child not stand out from the child’s spouse or spouses. The first thing that would have to be done to solve the problem would be to indent the spouse’s color block. Once that is done, the rest of what is needed would follow more or less automatically.
I also prefer grid layouts to non-grid layouts. RM8 seems to have gotten rid of grid layouts in several places, probably because some people think they are old fashioned and clunky. For example, I find the the lack of Family View being in a grid format makes RM8’s Family View very difficult to use. You can’t see at a glance in RM8’s Family View which children do or do not have birth dates or birth places or death dates or death places like you can in RM7.
I have asked repeatedly for the restoration of a classic grid like Family View, at least as an option. A classic grid view would give up the display of the children’s spouses in Family View, but the information in grid view is of much more value to me in Family View than are the spouses. That’s what Descendant View is for. I regularly use Descendant View set to only 2 generations in RM8 where I would have used Family View in RM7.
The sidelines in the left side of RM8’s Descendant View are necessary to implement to the new feature to be able to collapse a sub-tree. I find no value in that new feature, but I’m sure many users like it and some of RM’s competitors have it. The sidelines don’t bother me in RM8’s Descendant View because the rest of the View is still in grid format. But the indentation of the spouses in RM8’s Descendant View really does bother me. A lot.
So the text is indented the same in both instances. It is more the formatting of the presentation that is causing the problem. I think my view points on the extremely poor layout have been presented often enough so I won’t do it again.
I think that the color blocks should go away as they are currently designed. I had no problems with the formatting and text coloring in RM8. The use of the lines to the left side are really annoying to me. That type of formatting works in the various development IDE’s that I have worked with because it lets me see blocks of code better…however in presenting the descendants…
However it it comes about, I suspect we both agree that Bruce & Co. could have and should have done better and what we have makes working with the program more than a little annoying and cumbersome.
I agree with everything you said except for one thing. I actually like the color blocks. Some of the RGB color codes chosen for some of the colors are extremely wierd but I like the color blocks themselves.
The problem with RM7’s way of displaying the colors was that the color disappeared for the person who was highlighted and that’s the most important person for whom to know the color. I was forever having to move off a person and then back onto the person to see their color.
I’m pretty doubtful that the color blocks will go away and I’m pretty doubtful the lines on the left will go away. Either change would be huge. Getting rid of the lines on the left would also be getting rid of the ability to shrink one particular branch of the tree and I can’t picture that feature going away even though I personally do not find it to be of any value.
So I was just going for the low hanging fruit of the indentation problem. It does not affect any other screens and it should be easy to fix. And I think it’s important to fix.
Not if they did something similar to Windows Explorer, or Outlook, which use a > symbol that can be clicked to expand or shrink the branch.
As for the text color, in my world, that does not have to disappear when clicked on. Any number of things can be done to show it is the select text such as bolding, underlining, italicizing or coloring the background around the text, and probably a gazillion other options that I can’t think of. Using Windows Explorer, if you are on the ‘This PC’ branch and you click a subfolder such as ‘Desktop’ or ‘Documents’, the text remains black but a light blue (in my case) bar appears. In RM7, in Family view, they could have lightly colored the date box and left the text alone.
I think you have persuaded me that the lines on the left really aren’t necessary. As I think about it, I use a lot of different software that displays “trees” of various sort and which uses + and - to expand and hide blocks of items. There are seldom any lines on the left and the + and - signs are quite sufficient. For example, the text editor in Visual Studio which I use to develop C++ code does that for blocks of code or blocks of comments.
On the color block vs. color text issue, I actually probably agree with you philosophically that color text is a little more friendly than the color blocks and that highlighting can be handled without destroying the color. But after complaining for years that RM7 and all its predecessors that highlighting destroyed the color, I’m just happy that RM8 finally has a highlighting method and color method where the one doesn’t destroy the other that I’m reluctant to complain too loudly.
But indentation of the spouses really needs to be fixed. Another problem that needs to be fixed is that the left arrow to go to an older generation is in totally the wrong place. It’s to the right of a person’s name and it desperately needs to be to the left of a person’s name. The right arrow to go to a younger generation is also to the right of a person’s name which is precisely where it needs to be. So the right arrow shouldn’t be moved, only the left arrow.
