Behold FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions)

The alpha test version is currently available. I have set a goal of July 2008 for the release of the beta test version, and will work towards a version 1.0 release date of November 2008. On my Behold Future Plans page, I list what I am working on and what I plan to do towards future versions. If you want much more detail, there is my Behold Blog that is a unique documentation of Behold's development that you may find interesting and will give you a small insight into some of the difficulties that can occur along the way.

I had a prototype for Behold in 1995. It produced a nice text-based Everything Report. But then technology started to change. Everyone wanted to use Windows and see graphical based reports. The user interface was the hardest thing to create and it was only about 1998 that good tools started coming out for this. Then in 1999, Windows 98 finally took hold and memory management was not an issue anymore. In 2001, good third party tools became available. Then family and work and volunteerism and everything else that is part of life seemed to have its way of slowing things down. I have worked on and off on Behold since 1995, but to be honest the technology needed to make the version of Behold that I am releasing possible, only happened in the last couple of years. If nothing else, I hope when you try Behold, that I have made the wait worthwhile.

Yes. The alpha version is available on the Download Page. I am approaching the end of alpha development, and most of Behold's initial functionality is now in place. Soon, I will release the beta version (my goal being July 2008). It will be in beta test mode for several months while I eliminate bugs and ensure everything works as it should, hopefully with your help and the help of many other beta testers..

Behold is a BUY ONCE WITH FREE UPGRADES FOREVER product. I won't go through the shenanigans that other software does by making you pay to upgrade all the time. I want you, as a user of Behold to remain a user of Behold and to always have the latest version available to work with. (Besides, that way I'll only have one version to maintain, which will be easier on me :-) The price of the product will go up over time for new purchasers, so buying it early is to your advantage. I will price it at $42 US for version 1.0, and it may get to a final price of $69 when version 2.0 is completed. But I have an early-bird discount for those of you lucky enough to have already discovered it (as I am not advertising it yet). While it is still alpha, you should Buy Behold Now for only $20.

Behold is a fully-compliant 32-bit Windows program. It will run on Windows ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista. RAM is the major consideration. Behold loads the whole file and all its indexes into your computer's memory and needs lots of it. Currently on most computers, Behold can load files of 1,500 people very quickly. Files of up to 5,000 people can be loaded taking a bit longer, but it is still quite usable. I've loaded files up to 100,000 people, but that takes a few minutes to do and you need lots of RAM (like 1 GB). I am working to make Behold faster, so I'm hopeful that its capacity will increase as time goes on.

Last time I tested, Behold was still working under Windows 98. Over time, more incompatibilities will arise. It is unfortunate, but to fully support XP and Vista, poor old Windows 98 loses out. When off in the future, I finally add Unicode to Behold, that will probably spell the end of 98 support. But that's probably over a year away. If you don't upgrade to a new operating system by then, you're going to be having more problems than just worrying if Behold will run or not.

Well, not right away. I first need to develop the Windows version. But Windows emulation software is available that runs on a Mac. Behold should be able to run on a Mac under emulated Windows. For example check out Parallels or Guest PC (inexpensive) or Virtual PC for Mac (more expensive). My longer term plans are to convert Behold to .NET so it will ultimately be available on any platform, including Macs and Unix.

Currently, Behold can interpret the ANSEL and UTF-8 encodings in GEDCOM and you can specify the character set you want so that the characters display correctly. The disadvantage to this is only languages using the same character set can be displayed at the same time. In other words you can't mix Greek with Spanish, or Eastern European accents with Western European. But when Unicode is added to Behold, this will no longer be a problem.

The text that Behold displays for each GEDCOM tag can be changed on the Tag page of the Organize window. And every other word that Behold writes to the Everything Report can be changed on the Report page. So with users help (since I am not proficient in non-computer languages other than English), I'll build up default language files for Behold that will be included with each release and/or downloadable from the Behold website. If anyone wants to volunteer to help with this, please .

If you want to know if the entire user interface will be available in different languages, well that is a tougher task. There is a way to keep a resource file with Behold that tells it what text to put on each button and menu and screen. It gets tricky because in some languages the equivalent text may be too large for a button or too wide for a box. Translating it once to a language would not be too tough. Translating it to 20 languages would be tougher. What is most difficult is then maintaining it. Every time I make a program change, I then would have to make 20 translations as well. Also, trying to maintain the Help file in all those languages would double the effort. So right now, I can't see how I'd be able to manage this, but it is a long-term goal.

Hopefully your genealogy program exports links to photos into its GEDCOM. If so, then Version 1 should be able to display thumbnails of these photos, links to the full-size photos, with any information you have in your GEDCOM file about those photos. Later, after version 2 is out, I would like to add some powerful features to help you document your photos properly.

A text document with no structure whatsoever is impossible for any computer program to make sense of. It would take sophisticated artificial intelligence in order to determine where in the document the names of the people are, how they might be related, deciding which events are mentioned (e.g. birth, marriage, death, graduation, residence, occupation) and when they occurred and where. I am afraid you must go through the pain and use your human intelligence to properly decipher and enter your text documents into a genealogy program (any one will do) to get it into genealogical form that can be exported as GEDCOM.

That's actually quite different. HTML on the web is computer generated from GEDCOM. As a result, the generated HTML has a well-defined structure that is based on the original data. Building a program to read the HTML and converting it back to GEDCOM just involves understanding the structure, and reversing what was done to generate the HTML. A program to convert the HTML to GEDCOM would need to use different rules to convert depending on the program that wrote the HTML. That functionality will not be part of Behold. But Behold is a great tool to help figure out what is in that GEDCOM after you've got it.

Behold is the only program that lets you view and work with all your data at once. When Editing is enabled in version 2.0, Behold will be the only program that will let you enter, view, edit, and work with all your data at once. This will be a new technology for genealogists that will turn your hobby around. You will be able to enter your data many times faster than before, no longer slowed down by the cumbersome and inflexible fill-in-the-field forms of other programs. Behold will be your Genealogy Word Processor.

Recommending a program is like recommending a car. It really depends on what features you want and your personal taste. Over the last ten years I have always kept up-to-date on the state of Genealogy programming and the programs available. I've looked at and tried and compared dozens of other programs and I maintain my Genealogical Program Links Page with links to them. I invite you to try out other programs and get a feeling for them. They all can export their data to GEDCOM, so your work will not be lost. Then when Behold version 2.0 is out, try Behold and see what you think.