Who wrote GénàToile ?



Remainder : GénàToile could exist thank to Leslie Howard, who wrote ged2www and made it free software. Formerly, I downloaded the sources files, I have "Francised" it, then internationlized it. At last, I add some new features.
I had more an more difficulties to manage the modifications of that program : each new feature was more time consuming for tests. Besides, there is a Windows version of ged2wwwf, an a Mac OS one, adding some synchronization problems.

So, by a sunny day, I decide to write a new program. His features had to be :
- a useful User Interface,
- running under multiple environments,
- display notes and sources,
- moreover, it had to display the full contents of gedcom files.

Moreover, I wanted to enjoy writing this new program.
So I wrote it in java. I bought some books about java, I downloaded the compiler, some documentation, and I started my work.

The first version was released on june 2001.
Right away, I received a lot of mail, signaling bugs, asking for enhancements, crying for help...
Between two mail answers, I could manage a way to make that program live, not as fast as I would like, but...

A cyclic recurrent demand was countinuously very often claimed and asked all the time : hide the information for contemporaneous people.
I tried to escape, telling there are plenty of very good programs that can extract such data from gedcom files... No way ! You were still demanding, asking, claiming, begging, crying, etc...
Et alors ? et alors ? et alors ? ..... Hé hé ! Benoît est arrivé-é-é, sans s'presser-é-é, le grand Benoît, le beau Benoît, avec son PC et son grand chapeau. [wink to a French song by Henri Salvador]
Benoît started that work. He first analyzed the demand, had exchanges with some users, and brought us all you need to hide these tremendous data about contemporaneous.
A big thank to Benoît Mamet.
 
Beside, from the first ages of GénàToile, you were MANY MANY asking for a way to change colors. I stuck sat on my chair for a long time, not moving, pretexting that color change could make things difficult for someone browsing pages generated by an other one. At last,  Lionel Favre was very courageous and added that facility. Thank you, Lionel.

Then, Didier Ott added the possibility to have the pictures in a subdirectory, or on a file server.

More recently, Lionel Favre did a lot of work on GénàToile, particularly on the Sosa: you can have lists of Sosa, by numbers and by names, even beyond the 63th generation (programmers will apreciate !). Lionel also add the possibility to print some ages (ages of parents when they have children, ages at marriage, age at death.

If you have some ideas to improve GénàToile, just ask. And you can also do the job by yourself. The source files of GénàToile are on the Yahoo group.


 

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Updated November 28, 2018
© Jean-Baptiste Fahy, 2001-2018