Friday, August 17, 2012

No Family Tree Maker 2013

I received an email from Matthew Deighton of Ancestry.com today concerning their plans for Family Tree Maker this year:


"Ancestry.com normally announces the newest version of Family Tree Maker around this time of the year. Instead we have decided to make several key updates to the existing software, and give those updates away for free. We will be working hard this year to improve the current product and you will see these bonus features throughout the year.

"Remember, you will need to upgrade to Family Tree Maker 2012 before you can download the bonus features.

"Since Family Tree Maker 2012 was released last fall, a number of updates have been sent out that include improvements and new features. Here’s a list of just some of these great changes:
  • Numerous enhancements to TreeSync so syncing your tree to Ancestry.com is faster and more reliable
  • A new Family View Report that displays a person’s ancestors, spouse, and children together (similar to the Family View in the People workspace)
  • A new Undocumented Facts Report that lists people’s facts that have no source documentation
  • The ability to merge info from multiple versions of the same fact
  • New source templates for the 1940 U.S. census and improved support for city directories
  • Dozens of report enhancements including performance improvements and new options in the relationship chart, family group sheet, Individual Report, Notes Report, Data Errors Report, Outline Descendant Report, Media Item Report, photo albums, Media Usage Report, Documented Facts Report, and calendar
"And there are more enhancements to come in the next bonus update—so stayed tuned."

Note that the items listed above have already been implemented in the updated Family Tree Maker 2012 program.  There is no list, yet, of the future enhancements.

Family Tree Maker is the only major genealogy software company that has charged year over year for their yearly updates.  Other software programs go for three to five years before they come out with a software upgrade that requires customers to buy the updated program.

See earlier discussion on Family Tree Maker 2013 in Will there be a Family Tree Maker 2013? posted on 9 August 2012.  


1 comment:

Aylarja said...

Well, those of us who speculated now have our answer. Reading through the list of features in this FTM 2012 refresh, none of them look terribly exciting - not the stuff of which a full-version increase is made of, at least from a marketing standpoint.

Since I am an admitted cynic on such matters, I am curious if some more-dazzling feature-set was in the works but couldn't be perfected enough for the annual version-increase release? Perhaps something related to Ancestry's expanded entry into genetic genealogy? Perhaps - but perhaps not. And I doubt we outsiders will ever know. Oh, well. I can direct my $25 upgrade fee to some more worthy purpose this year...