Kindo Family Blog

No person in the UK with at least a slight interest for genealogy can have missed all the buzz about the first two seasons of the BBC One Show “Who do you think you are?”. When it was first put on air in 2004, it became immediately the most popular show of the the year and this summer, a special episode was broadcast which made the genealogy web-pages peak in page views. Good news, it’s only a week until season four starts!

BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/familyhistory/get_started/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Do_You_Think_You_Are%3F

Well, it was not exactly intended, but see what the urban slang understands by “Kindo”.

Hence, a semi-official proof that the name was a good choice. And maybe one day humankind has to update its encyclopaediae and the new entry will look something like this:

“Kin-do (singular): Wellknown brand of a family network and several on- and offline family products and services.”

“So you’re between the ages of 13 and 24. What makes you happy? A worried, weary parent might imagine the answer to sound something like this: Sex, drugs, a little rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe some cash, or at least the car keys.

Turns out the real answer is quite different. Spending time with family was the top answer to that open-ended question, according to an extensive survey — more than 100 questions asked of 1,280 people ages 13-24 — conducted by The Associated Press and MTV on the nature of happiness among America’s young people.”

Link to full article

We’re having fun building the Kindo application and used a number of frameworks and components to achieve the finished result.

For the web framework we’re using Seagull which offers excellent integration with Flash through the AMF PHP request handling and easy integration with Ajax and Graphviz. For the Ajax interactions we use jquery exclusively, for Graphviz a heavily extended version of the PEAR lib of the same name. Working with the dot language has been interesting and a good opportunity to experiment with the subtleties of a genealogy graph.

In terms of GUI interaction the app mimics desktop conventions with “true” MVC behaviour, ie you update the data model by adding a person to the tree, and multiple views of your data update simultaneously, in the main and left panels. This was achieved by using a javascript front controller which listens for events in the DOM and from the Flash movie and fires the appropriate observers, communicating with the data access layer via Ajax requests.

For the tree building functionality in Flash we’re using ActionScipt 2 and make extensive use of Pixlib, which is designed to support event handling, logging, data preloading, managing sound and video, making transitions, data holders and data structures, patterns implementations, etc.

On the data storage side MySQL5 was chosen for its speed and decent implementation of stored procedures, views and functions.

The last three months will probably never been forgotten amongst the people that have put this Alpha release together. We’ve assembled a team of around 20 people from at least 12 different cultures, and we’ve managed technically to develop something which is truly cutting edge. Most importantly, we’re doing something which we feel will benefit families who use Kindo.

So now we’re ready to release it to people we trust in order to get valuable user feedback.

Living and breathing what we’re doing every day sometimes means that often we don’t see the wood for the trees. Having people external to our team try out what we’re doing then give us feedback, is such a valuable process, and we’re hoping that it will help us to discover new bugs, problems, and cultural differences that will enable us to give our users something truly exciting. Of course, we are already aware of many bugs, but having our friends and family help us to find more is both important and rewarding. We like to think of it as continually polishing our masterpiece.

We’d really appreciate your feedback, suggestions, bug reports, and ideas.

To do that we’ve created this area we’re calling “Pregnant” to discuss everything related to what we’re doing, because we want to keep things real. We’re hoping that as we grow and develop Kindo further, you’ll help us to make the right decisions about what features we add, and tell us what you think we’re perhaps doing the wrong way.

After all, we’re only people, and we’re making the assumption that getting things right for families around the world is going to be an interactive process involving other people from all over the world!

As such, please note that this Alpha release:

1. is primarily about bug squashing
2. has many other features and branding that is in progress - what you see now is not entirely what will be launched to the public
3. is for a few people to keep things private for now
4. will probably help us to discover more bugs, so your data might be deleted. This is good because it will help us make family tree builder better
5. wont send emails to people you add to your tree, yet!

Welcome to the family!

There are bugs and issues that we’re aware of, so we thought it would be a great idea if everyone could see them.

As we get them fixed, we’ll let everyone know, and make the list a little bit smaller!!

You can view the page here