DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - FEB 2017
SOURCES AND REVIEWS OF FREEWARE - PART 3
©2017 Donald R. Snow - page last updated 2017-05-10.
These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology,
our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG)
monthly newsletter. They are also posted on my Freeware
Corner Notes page on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where the links are active and there may be corrections and
additions and other related notes and articles.
ABSTRACT
There are many free programs that help with nearly anything
you are doing on a computer; the problem is learning what they
are, finding, downloading, installing, and learning how to use
them. This is my third FREEWARE CORNER article on the subject.
One way to find freeware is to search online, but that is
usually time consuming and sometimes you don't really know
what to ask for. That's where catching a vision of what the
computer can do to help by hearing or reading about it really
helps. Hopefully, this article will give you a few more ideas.
FREEWARE AND SHAREWARE
In an earlier note we pointed out that freeware is completely
free and can be used, given away, posted on your website,
etc., with no cost. Shareware is available to download and try
out and, if you decide you want to continue using it, you are
on your honor to send the author a small donation, usually
$5-$20. Be careful when you find a "free to try" note since
that usually means it is a commercial program and you can only
use it for a couple of weeks before it stops working, unless
you pay for it. I seldom bother with free-to-try programs
since many times they ask for a credit card number before you
even try it and sometimes you don't even know the price until
after you have downloaded and/or installed it. Shareware
sometimes has a "nag screen" that comes on after a couple of
weeks that requests that you send a donation, if you want to
continue to use it. Freeware usually doesn't have any nag
screens and remains completely free.
GOOGLE AND OTHER SEARCHES FOR FREEWARE
To find programs you can always just do a Google search for
things like "freeware for genealogy". After working with a few
different websites that list programs and downloads, you begin
to feel more comfortable with some and you have confidence
that you won't get a computer virus from them. Another
approach is to use a website like FamilySearch Wiki or
Wikipedia to get information and ideas. Once you find a
program that does what you want, you may have to do Google
searches to find where to download it.
CYNDI'S LIST -- http://www.cyndislist.com/cyndislistsearch/?q=freeware
Cyndi Howell is a housewife in the state of Washington that
started making up lists of family history websites for her
friends and, as the lists grew larger, she and her husband
eventually formed a company with a webpage that lists all the
links she finds. The links on her webspage now number more
than 300,000 in more than 200 categories. A search there for
"free genealogy software" yielded more than 170 hits and most
of these are links to entire collections. Her category of Free
Genealogy Software contains 18 links itself and some of these
are in foreign languages. This is a worthwhile site to browser
through, and not just for software, since it's a major source
of family history information.
GENSOFT REVIEWS --
http://www.gensoftreviews.com/
This website contains reviews of genealogy software, freeware
and commercial, with links to their webpages. It contains over
4000 reviews that have been written by hundreds of people
since it first started in 2008. To search it there are boxes
where you can select various types of filters. I recommend
just leaving those at their default values and entering your
keywords, then filtering down after you have some results. The
filters are for things like all licenses, only freeware, or
only commercial (purchase); all platforms or only Windows,
Mac, etc.; and all types, such as Full Featured, Utility,
Auxiliary, etc. The results can be sorted by best rating,
latest, most, least, date, etc. Most programs useful in
genealogy have been reviewed here at some time and it is an
easy site to navigate. Most, if not all, of the FamilySearch
Certified apps are reviewed here. Each review includes the
website for the program or item, so it is easy to find their
website, if you are interested. I typed in "descendants" as a
keyword and got 982 reviews. Narrowing these down to Free,
Windows, and Full Featured, reduced the list to 48. The
reviews were all in English, but a few of the programs were in
Dutch, German, and French. You could add "Dutch" as a keyword,
if that's the language in which you want a program. This is a
very helpful website for reviewing and finding genealogy
programs.
FAMILYSEARCH WIKI -- https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Windows_Genealogy_Software
The FamilySearch Wiki just lists a few of the full-featured
programs and links to them. There may be articles about the
FamilySearch Certified apps, but it seems to list only a few
programs. Since it is a wiki, someone has to write an article
about a program for it to be there. To see a list of all the
Certified apps that go with FamilySearch see the FamilySearch
App Gallery (link at the bottom of every FamilySearch page) --
https://familysearch.org/apps/
.
WIKIPEDIA
- Comparison of Genealogy Software -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_genealogy_software
This website is a color-coded comparison chart of
full-featured genealogy database programs, not auxiliary
or utility programs. It has many comparison features,
including latest version, latest date, whether free or
not, operating systems, types of reports, and even the
languages it is available in, but, unfortunately, it
doesn't cover freeware, except the free versions of some
of the full-featured programs.
- Categories of freeware --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_software_lists_and_comparisons
This includes links to Wikipedia articles containing lists
of freeware in categories such as for different operating
systems, types of licenses, whether source code is
available, for audio, and other categories.
- Outline of Freeware -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_free_software
This gives a list of organizations producing freeware and
their history.
- Genealogy Software -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_software
Lists only full-featured genealogy programs
- Software Comparisons Lists -- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=software+comparison+lists&title=Special:Search&go=Go&searchToken=cwhpmvhtpimecprgkzasqkdzx
You may find some comparisons of software of
interest here.
- About freeware -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware
SOURCEFORGE -- https://sourceforge.net/directory/os:windows/?q=genealogy
This is the site for free open source genealogy software. Open
source means that the program is free and even the programing
code is available so, if you know enough about programing, you
can even alter the code to make it do things the way you want.
Most of us don't know enough about programing to alter the
code, but many of the programs are very helpful. The authors
or groups of authors frequently update open source software
and send out notes when new versions are available, so you can
keep up to date with the latest version. On this webpage when
I checked today (Feb 2017) there are 9 pages of genealogy
programs, each page with about 25 programs on it. Clicking on
the program or the pick arrow (small downward pointing arrow
at right) opens that box, so you see the short write up about
it, the date it was last updated, and a download button. On
the left side of the frame is a statement about Hot Topics in
Genealogy Software with several different links you can go to.
On the right side of the frame is a list of the top 10
downloads during the last week. This is a major website for
freeware and this last week it says there were 31 million
downloads of programs of all types, not just genealogy.
QUORA -- https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-free-genealogy-software
This is a wiki-type website where people ask questions about
various topics and knowledgeable people contribute their
answers. Of the many questions discussed here, one is What is
the Best Free Genealogy Software? Those who write answers seem
to assume that this question only refers to full-featured
programs and not auxiliary or utility genealogy programs, so
that's what the discussions are about. However, you may still
find some helpful comments here, as well as helpful links to
other sites.
CONCLUSIONS
These are a few more of the many websites, lists, and reviews
of genealogy freeware and I will probably write more Freeware
Corner articles about this topic another time.
=====================================