It can help locating people imigrated to various destinations, maintaining their original names but changing the languages they use to write those names.
Absolutely agree - we immigrated to the US from China and so the last few generations speak some Chinese but mostly everything is in English. But another large part of my family is still in China and speak/write in Mandarin. It would be great to have both our English names and Mandarin names associated so we wouldn't need romanized names for ancestors who never spoke English.
Until this happens, this site is fairly useless to me since I cannot easily get my Chinese relatives to participate and therefore can't go back more than one generation past our immigrant parents, and it ends up being all in romanized chinese. Useless if we want to get to know branches from great-great grandparents, distant cousins, etc. who only speak Mandarin/Cantonese
Many member of my family married partners from various parts of Asia. For most of us, our wives, our kids and their ancestors all use non romanised characters sets. The FAQ claims Mandarin support, but the management software (Family Tree Builder) does not support it (I have tested version 6.0). We can type in romanised versions for searching, but we want to preserve the proper charaters for historical puposes. The software hasfields for "other" names and "nicknames", and we could alwways use formats such as "LEE (李)" but all we get is "LEE (?)".
I really like the Family Tree Builder interface, but it is quite usless without proper Unicode support.
Hi Craig,
Asian languages support is currently only available on the website.
Family Tree Builder Version 6 supports 36 languages and Chinese as other Asian languages are not included.
The good news is that we are abpout to release Family Tree Builder 7 with total support of UTF-8 languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
I would love if you can volunteer to help us keeping these languages translation up to date.
It could be great to visualize both the family tree and a timeline. The timeline would show every event related to the persons drawed, and aldo would be able to import "personalized" events, i.e. historical world, national, local events, etc.
just a simple timeline... whre people's pic in placeholder on a normal timeline graph...the other would be... to have it still in "family tree" look...but stretched out over time.... the criss crossing lines might get to be challenging. but the MH team is always up for those :)
I have been able to enter Hebrew names in the comment field of the Birth event from a Windows machine, but it does not seem to be possible on the Mac (I have tried Safari, Firefox, and Camino). There is no problem VIEWING the information from a Mac; the difficulty arises only with data entry. I find typing in Hebrew easier on my Mac, so I hope that this bug can be tracked down and corrected.
I also second the request for support for Hebrew dates. Especially valuable for yahrzeit, but also births, weddings, bar and bat mitzvot, etc. The Hebrew date cannot be calculated from the English date because some life events occur after sunset (e.g., the births of all three of my children). I have been entering Hebrew dates in comment fields, but this does not generate calendar alerts. Along these lines, perhaps the user should be allowed to select which anniversaries of life events (birthdays etc.) will appear on the family calendar, and whether listings should be calculated based on the Hebrew or civil (Gregorian) date.
Can we make a field called Obituaries? I have started to add obituary text to the "Death" field for deceased family members in our my heritage site. A problem I am running up against is it seems the field is limited in the amount of characters. At first it takes the whole obituary, but after coming back to the person's record, it truncates it to about 2 1/2 lines.
Any ideas other than submitting 4 or 5 seperate death entries?
That is a great idea, I will forward it to our development team.
In the meanwhile, you can put a long commnet on that person's genealogical card.
You can reach his card if you go to the Family Tree > People page in your Family Site. Search for the relevant person, click on his name, and add the comment.
I live in Australia in the GMT 10 timezone so by the time i get my upcoming-event email reminders, it's the day of the event here, rather than the day before as it would be for most of the other users of this site.
It would be useful to be able to change the time zone setting to my location, and also set the reminders to be delivered a few days ahead rather than the day before. I need more notice if the reminder service is to be truly useful.
I have sent these to the myheritage.com team, however, I felt that sharing these publicly for everyone's feedback would be helpful.
here are some ideas, suggests, feature requests I have been thinking about in some order of priority
i believe that a two-way sync at this point is extremely imporant to adopt into FTB. It has been "coming soon" for qutie some time. but a comprehensive facility to sync all info, photos, etc btween the website adn the software would be a great help.
though my family (and a couple of others i know) uses the website, it is merely used from time to time to take a look at the tree. other than that they use social media platforms as myspace, and hi5, and facebook etc for everyday communication. i think if myheritage.com coordinates with meebo.com and inserts a widget such that whenever someoen logs on to their myheritage page, the widget gets activated with their info that they would have to put in once, and then they would be connected to all their chat services.
myheritage.com needs to become ipod touch/iphone/blackberry friendly. mobile browsing is becomign the thing to do, more and more websites are optimized for mobile use. it is only intuitive that m.myheritage.com is launched soon :)
in the features such as celebrity look alikes, look alike meter etc... there should be an option to pick a picture from the uploaded ones, rather than uploading new pictures.
as you and your team must know, web based, and desktop based software development is moving towards constant feedback from users to a relatively opensource sort of environment. frequent beta-release updates to the software is better than an annual major update. this way, users can inform of bugs, and test of features, and let you know which features can be tweaked, and how, and which are not used.
being able to log in using openID, google ID, or facebook connect platform would make it EVEN easier for people to log on. and they will be able to use google docs, etc, services to post links, documents, pictures etc.
these are just some ideas ive been thinking about. will write about more as they come.
i think releasing beta candidates to the public can be extrememly useful in rectifying bugs.
to me, these seem to be the order of the day. however, i am sure the wonderful development team has a plan :)
its good to be in touch with users through the blog as well.
hope this will be helpful in making myheritage.com and FTB ... EVEN better. :)
Please tell them for me that the first two points of the poster should be your TOP priority. Otherwise you will remain the least useful genealogy site to which I subscribe.
I post my data here and other family members post corrections and additions. Then I can neither access that data nor download it (I'm told by other members -- but not staff -- that is true UNLESS I built my database using their products.)
I paid five years in advance because I bought the advertising hype. All I can say is, "This buyer should have bewared."
My future spending will be on sites that offer two-way sync.
I invite relatives to post corrections/additions. I get a notice they have done so but I cannot do anything but view the changes/additions. If I "print" I get a message saying it is generating a message and to watch for it in my inbox -- I never see it. If I download my GEDCom, the changes/additions are not in it (I get the GEDCom I originally uploaded.) If I use Family Tree Builder to access my on-line data I see only the GEDCom I originally uploaded.
The only way I have been able to "download" the information is to copy it by hand and then enter it into my own database -- a not very useful method.
I agree with the first poster about the 2 way sync being crucial for the contintued success of extending the useage of both the web and the FTB software!
Please corect me if I'm wrong in the way to work at the moment:
1) I make my tree with the FTB software
2) I export the GETCOM to an online editable version
3) I let my invitees correct that version online and in the mean time I cannot change in the FTB software(?)
4) I then export the online version again as GETCOM and import into the FTB software for further update.
