After my going MIA for the last week you may all think that I really did leave or quit.  Not so, I just got swamped.  There’s a lot for me to juggle, including but not limited to:

1. Deciding where I want to work when I graduate this December
2. Fixing all the bugs in the product I’m actually paid to work on
3. Learning about real estate and home buying

Even so, I try to find time here and there to continue work on Genesis.  It would be nice to turn this into my full-time job, but I don’t see anyone jumping at the opportunity to fund open-source genealogy software.  It makes it hard to do all the things I’d really like to do.  Nevertheless, the next release will include two pretty cool new features:

1. If an image is associated with a given individual, it will be shown to the left of the list of facts
2. Each fact will have a link to it’s sources

The first feature is rather nifty, but I wanted to talk a bit more about the second.

Sources
There are a number of motivations for my buckling down and getting the sources working.  In the spirit of enumeration they are, in increasing order of importance:

1. To showcase the ability to support hierarchical provenance (one of the compelling reasons for the data model I’m using)
2. To hurry up and finish this thesis project
3. To make it clear that PGVAgent does not exist to rip off other people’s work

Besides, I have a shrinking window of opportunity in which to advance Genesis to the point that others will take an interest in it and start contributing.  If that doesn’t happen, it will probably die.

Setting such morbid thoughts aside, originally I was planning on putting a little hyperlink labeled either “Source” or with a small icon next to each fact.  I tried that, but having a column of links labeled “Source” down the right side of the screen wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, and I can’t find a small icon that really communicates source.  I spent a long time brainstorming before I finally stumbled on what should have been eminently obvious from the start.  One word: footnotes.

The idea is really quite simple.  Next to each fact, put numerals in brackets ([1], [2]) that link to the source.  When the user hovers over one of the source numbers, a tooltip appears with a summary of that source.  And then at the bottom of the view is a list of all the sources, just like the bottom of a page in a book.

I’m really quite enamored with this idea because it communicates a lot of information in very little space.  At a glance you can see whether or not two facts come from the same source.  You can tell exactly how many sources cite a given fact.  You can scroll to the bottom to see all the source information at once without having to look up each source individually.  And it all looks a lot better than a column of little book icons that communicate next to nothing, such as what they are even there for.  I don’t expect everyone doing genealogy to be comfortable with computers, but I do expect them to know what footnotes are.

I’ll post a screenshot as soon as I get this all working.

Filed in Genesis
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