Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React

by aqrashik • 9 years ago

89 51 9 years ago

ameister14• 9 years ago

Rather than clicking the plus to add a person, I think a more intuitive action would be to double-click empty space. Whether or not you change that, the 'click + to add a person' doesn't work - when you put the word 'click' on a page, people will click that and not pay attention to the rest of the directions. Even if they did, it's a little confusing because 'click + to add a person' isn't clear. You need to be more specific. 'click the plus button to add a person' and then have the plus button move so people see it.

jhaddon• 9 years ago

A simple guided tutorial, similar to the beginning of most mobile games, could help here. You literally walk the user through the process of adding one person (themself most likely) and then let them grow from there. With a 'skip' option of course, if they don't want or need their hand held.

aqrashik5• 9 years ago

Thanks, I've tried to make onboarding easier by showing the popup tooltips, but I guess it needs more work

aqrashik5• 9 years ago

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll see how I can make it more intuitive

matt_morgan2• 9 years ago

I recommend starting with one empty box (every family tree has at least one member) than an entirely blank screen.

mapster• 9 years ago

or a palette of avatars you drag and drop into the network (son, daughter, man, woman, etc)

hougaard• 9 years ago

Hey, sounds cool, let me just upload my GED^ file...

Ups, no upload feature (yet) - That would make it much more usable.

(^) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM

innopreneur• 9 years ago

Nice work. Which library did you used for rendering connectors? I don't know how would you monetize it if you plan to. Also are you planning to open-source the code base?

aqrashik5• 9 years ago

It's just svg circles animated with css so no libraries were required. I've tried to keep external libraries to a minimum

ecesena2• 9 years ago

Any reasons for not having Facebook login (and perhaps deeper integration)?

aqrashik5• 9 years ago

No reason in particular, but I don't have a Facebook account so integration with Facebook would have required me to sign up first to test the integration. I don't mind creating an account on Facebook if required, but I am trying to avoid it if possible.

ecesena2• 9 years ago

Oh, I just got downvoted, unsure why. I was thinking that it's a pretty neat tool to integrate with Facebook. As your primary goal is to build your family structure, you may want to share it with your family members (and maybe have them help building the tree).

Also, depending how you want to grow, fb login is typically the most successful one.

zwischenzug• 9 years ago

Coincidentally, I was talking to my father about getting his family tree work 'stored' in some digital format for future generations.

It struck me that a simple directory structure with info about each person in each directory, text files with info in, and then tar'd up would be about the most future-proof format you could get.

Anyone else thought about this?

basseq6• 9 years ago

That might be the "easiest", but it's not the most portable, and would be a nightmare to navigate. I'd recommend he work in a software package that can export to GEDCOM. That's a structured data format used by genealogists to track relationships and metadata. The current version is 21 years old, and the original spec was designed in 1984. It's robust and industry-standard. Every single genealogical product worth its salt will be able to work with that format (and export to it).

I hate to recommend them, but ancestry.com has one of the best interfaces in a SaaS product, with a ton of data on the back-end if you are doing research. An actual application (Family Tree Maker comes to mind, but don't quote me or take that as a recommendation) might be better for just "documenting" research.

maxerickson• 9 years ago

Is it robust? I help my mom with genealogy stuff from time to time and the gedcom file we got from some cousins was, let us say, a mess.

I agree it is widely supported.

One thing to watch out for with export is whether you are working with data that doesn't make it into the gedcom file.

arxpoetica• 9 years ago

I'm not just being flippant, but GEDCOM is a dinosaur. Can you imagine Facebook storing its relationship data in GEDCOM? Unthinkable. Genealogy most certainly needs a new standard.

Also, I know people who work for ancestry, and the general thinking is it's hard to update old interfaces for a newer generation when a very important public is 50+.

fiatjaf6• 9 years ago

You're thinking the same things I do.

I should have read your comment before posting my shameless self-promotion, but here am I posting my super simple, customizable and future-proof tool again: https://github.com/fiatjaf/rel

(read about it on my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849823)

basseq6• 9 years ago

I love family trees: they're interesting, complex, data-driven, and beautiful. There are some very challenging decisions you need to make to make a tree readable, like whose ancestors to show, whose children, and how far back. To give you a sense, I have ~3,500 people in my family tree. I want different trees to show, say: a) all descendants of a root ancestor, or b) all of my ancestors.

This is reasonably easy to use and build out a simple tree. Here are two opportunities:

1) There are some UI areas that aren't totally intuitive (e.g., double click to add name), and generally it feels to "clicky" (e.g., too many clicks to get to the action I want). I think your goal is super-simple and "delightful" vs. full-featured.

2) The 1:1 relationship lines get complex, as every parent is linked to every child (so you end up with 2n lines that all overlap).

aqrashik5• 9 years ago

Thanks. Trees that are too big do get hard to manage currently and it is something I have been unable to decide on a solution for. I was thinking of allowing users themselves to expand or compress ancestors and descendants ( which would mean even more clicks :( ) to focus on the part of the tree they were currently working on.

yosyp• 9 years ago

This is very interesting insight! May I ask which software or service you use to keep track of your family tree?

basseq6• 9 years ago

Ancestry.com has the best UI and is the "easiest" to use that I've found. You can use it for free to just build your tree, but you'll feel like a second-class citizen. Their data sources are very good and easy to use, but you pay out the nose for them. (Obligatory note that I very much disagree with how Ancestry.com has set themselves up to collect money off the backs of researchers who often work for free, and will put your inputs behind their paywall.)

So Ancestry.com is a good place for research and for family tree management. I've set up the second half of my stack to generate HTML files, which I keep (publicly) on my personal site.

k__• 9 years ago

3500?!

and I don't even know who my grandfather was...

basseq6• 9 years ago

I go both up (I know all but 2 of my 16 g-g-grandparents, and 22 of my 32 g-g-g-grandparents) and down (I'm tracking 14+ generations of everyone descended from my 10th great-grandfather).

I'm the kind of person that likes 100% completion in my video games, so the idea of "filling in" all the gaps is satisfying to me. The amount of public records on BMD (birth, marriage, and death—the "holy trinity" of genealogical data points) is staggering in most countries. From census and SSA records in the U.S. to parish records in Scotland, you can find a lot of information.

jermaustin1• 9 years ago

When you launch the person dialog, focus on the Name input, then when they click enter, save and close the dialog. You are also missing out on a number of fields when creating a family tree (gender and maiden name come to mind fight off the bat).

fiatjaf6• 9 years ago

I've searched my entire life for a way to write simple family trees with custom data, fast, with or without a lot of information.

Then I've come up with this: https://github.com/fiatjaf/rel, which is a simple way to create triples, then render dot graphs, or any template actually, with them. The database is actually a bunch of YAML files representing each node in the graph (the relationships are stored in the nodes' files also).

dankent2• 9 years ago

I really like the overall approach - definitely a nice friendly way to edit a tree.

The standard way for family trees to link children with parents is through the relationship of the parents. Did you avoid doing that on purpose?

The problem with having a separate parent/child link for every parent/child relationship is that it gets very crowded if the parents have several children.

fiatjaf6• 9 years ago

I don't have experience in this area, but wouldn't the standard way get pretty messy in modern relationships, in which people have multiple children with multiple different alternating parents?

dankent2• 9 years ago

I assume you want to represent all of the relationships on the tree in any case, so I think minimising the number of required parent-child lines would actually make representing modern relationships less messy.

You'd have a pink relationship line for each partnership (that will be the same and just as messy in both approaches)

Then you'd have one child line from each relationship line to each of the children that came from that relationship, rather than two for each child.

So in a situation where Angus had 2 children with each of Beatrix and Chloe, you would have two child lines from the Angus-Beatrix relationship line and two from the Angus-Chloe line, rather than a total of 8 lines to show all the parent-child relationships in your current approach.

If Chloe also had two children with David then your approach would add a relationship line and another four child lines whereas the standard approach would just add the relationship and two more child lines.

matt_morgan2• 9 years ago

Nice! BTW I've never found a really nice, easy way to draw up organizational hierarchy charts (I've always used Dia or similar, and that's fussy), and I guess it's the same thing more or less?

fiatjaf6• 9 years ago

Have you ever looked into Graphviz?

Here's a demo of the same old C Graphviz program running on JS: http://viz-js.com/

dpcx2• 9 years ago

I've been a user and fan of Geni.com for several years now. I wish they'd update their interface to allow some friendliness like this.

creativeembassy• 9 years ago

Same. I've considered making my own interface for building family trees, as an exercise in UX design. But I'd want it to plug directly into Geni. You can't beat the feature to find other users' trees that match yours. Find long-lost cousins and great-great-great-whatevers that you didn't know you had.

dpcx2• 9 years ago

I've considered multiple times writing an importer/exporter against their API so that I can use Gramps[1] to manage the rest of it.

[1] https://gramps-project.org/introduction-WP/

dulcinea• 9 years ago

Is this project downable? Github?

iso-8859-1• 9 years ago

No. It's proprietary. And you can't even save without paying! :O

garyfirestorm• 9 years ago

I couldn't download the tree i just drew. It gave me an 'unknown error while downloading' Chrome on Google Pixel

sAbakumoff• 9 years ago

OOC - what value "built with React" brings to the thing you have implemented?

Xeoncross• 9 years ago

$4.99 a month seems a bit steep for what looks like a very basic UI with no features like multi-user editing or photos or anything other than a node-link builder.

It's still a nice UI for the primary task.

git-pull• 9 years ago

Example idea: Consider an example of a filled tree to show off. For instance, Game of Thrones

Pivot idea: Consider using the chart tool to map out relations of characters in stories, TV shows, legal cases, etc.

Service integration (client): Consider if your tree could fit in as a GSuite add-on: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/add-ons/

Service integration (host): create REST API's, or language libraries for people to use your tool programatically

Viral idea: Consider offering family trees for free so Wikia pages can link to them

Viral idea: Consider an embeddable app with zooming/panning that media websites and pay a monthly fee to integrate

Viral idea: Consider an import/export JSON schema users can use to share their graphs

crooked-v• 9 years ago

If you really want to stress-test an arbitrary family tree documenter, try putting the X-Men in it.

http://img13.deviantart.net/4a05/i/2011/253/c/b/x_men_family... (and that's just the tip of the iceberg!)

Real family tress don't have to worry about time travel or cloning, of course, but that crazy stuff does actually serve as a reasonably good proxy of some of the strangest family trees out there (medieval European nobility, extended families with multiple divorces and remarryings, etc).

lecarore• 9 years ago

Cute graphics ! Some feedbacks :

- Please make sure forms can be validated with enter, an not just by clicking a button (use for onSubmit)

- allways auto-focus most important input of form (like a person's name) when opening it (at least when it's empty)

-after adding a person, open the form immediately

- when tree is empty, put the + button in the center of the screen, big, and with explaination. THen, make a transition to put it back to it's normal place. This way it makes it obvious and then falls back to standard material design location. Other option is to make an empty state image with a big, obvious arrow to the button.

- maybe add transitions that help user follow the change of state when adding someone to the tree.

Great work overall, i wish you the best for your project.

ludicast• 9 years ago

Beautiful job.

There might be some people posting "why didn't you just..." but I used this to show my kids their family tree and they really liked it.

Freeloaded though, so you need a way to compell people to pay (say extra large posters of the tree).

neRok2• 9 years ago

Good effort. I tried making something similar years ago, and it was hard (the visual side, not the data side).

I don't know what your goals are with this though. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but to 'genealogy enthusiasts', ie the people regularly spending money in this domain, your website is no more than a toy. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Ancestry.com offers this same tree building functionality for free (when you pay for a subscription with them, it is for the research capability, not the data entry capability).

mathgeek• 9 years ago

I'll admit that I spent a little too much time on this trying to create the most interconnected tree I could imagine, just to see how many "my descendent is also my ancestor" connections are possible. The flexibility of this is pretty impressive.

losteverything• 9 years ago

Post to r/genealogy as there are requests from time to time for tree makers.

Fyi. The church of latter day saints (Mormons) have familysearch.org which has circles to show generations. The church has for decades housed and built the largest library for finding relatives. I believe this is because once you enter the church you can "save" all your deceased relatives going back as far as you can.

The tree is really not important to genealogy nuts....

Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React

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