Family Tree Maker

Originally Posted by kiterunner

Wow, 4,492 comments on ancestry's blog entry so far!

Now 5,226!

[ElizabethHerts]

Originally Posted by kiterunner

I can see why people would be upset if they use the "Tree Sync" feature (i.e. they sync their FTM tree with their ancestry one), but a lot of the people commenting on there are reacting as though they won't be able to use FTM at all any more. Surely if it works on their computers at the moment, it will still work even when ancestry stop selling and supporting it, apart from the actual tree sync feature?

I know it might be annoying, but people do tend to over-react to any changes.

[Phoenix]

Surely the point is that once software is no longer supported, things will start to go wrong?

I never have used FTM, so it's no skin off my nose, but I have known the wrench of migrating data to another program and inevitably discovering that some bit of functionality is lost.

Isn't the underlying reason for the fuss because Ancestry want us to gift all our trees to their website and many people don't want to?

[Mary from Italy]

I'm also still using FTM 2006. There's nothing to stop us continuing to use that or the other existing versions, they just won't issue security patches etc. for them.

And there are other offline tree programs. Wikipedia's done a chart comparing their features, although it isn't quite up-to-date, because PAF's also been discontinued:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...alogy_software

[Phoenix]

I have recently loaded Lotus (a product like, but superior to, Office) which was discontinued in about 2000. So I know you can do such things. However, no matter how simple it may be to use old programs on new systems, surely most of the people who use FTM do so because they are not aware of the multiplicity of other programs available, or how to use them.

[Mary from Italy]

It isn't necessarily simple to use old programs on new systems. The main problem is that they may have security holes that need patching, or they may simply be incompatible with new operating systems. I only upgraded recently to Windows 7, and although some of my previous programs worked, at least 4 didn't.

FTM 2006 gives an error message when I use it with W7, but so far it seems to work. I haven't tried out all its features yet, though.

[kiterunner]

As far as I know, I have never had a security patch for FTM 2006. Nor for FTM 2011 which I have on my Windows 10 laptop.

[Mary from Italy]

Originally Posted by kiterunner

As far as I know, I have never had a security patch for FTM 2006.

Nor have I, but I wondered if the later versions of the programs dealt with any security problems in the earlier versions.

[kiterunner]

The latest versions of FTM are surely compatible with Windows 10 (and I have seen on another forum where someone said they were using a 20-year-old version of FTM on a new Windows 10 computer!) and Microsoft have said that Windows 10 will be the last ever Windows operating system, so I can't see that there will be any major problems in the future other than the tree sync feature and other online facilities eventually breaking.

Reading through the comments on ancestry's blog, they seem to be expecting ancestry representatives to come round to their houses, force them to uninstall FTM and stamp on the disk!

[Mary from Italy]