Family Tree Maker 2008 BETA

I am very excited! I found the link to download the BETA. I just put it on and have the following observations based on my 35 minute look at the product.

• I really like the new layout. There is much more information available on the screen. To me, it is not overly cluttered. I am running on a 17" wide-screen laptop. It looks modern and quite nice in Windows Vista.
• Navigating is made much easier by buttons and tabs across the top of the window. There are also simple shortcuts for main views (Ctrl+1=Plan, Ctrl+2=People, etc.).
• The task functionality is more visible than in prior versions. You can create tasks by person, family and overall. The Plan view shows all your tasks by group. You can do basic filtering. The tasks themselves are still very basic, but that is probably ok (keep in mind this is still fairly new to me).
• "Places" provides a Microsoft Virtual Earth view of the cities and towns that are in your database. This is pretty handy and easy to use.
• When looking at an individual there is a timeline view that can also show family information as well as historical facts near the events of the person's life. Did a quick check for some of the earlier relatives and it has a few facts from the 1600's. I would imagine this is easily extensible.

There are a few things that are not as smooth as I'd like.

• There is no All-In-One chart. This was a key feature in earlier versions of the application and a differentiator from other genealogy applications. It provides a view of your entire file, without page breaks, that you can use to see relationships as well as get a feel for the whole family. I hope it is just not available in the BETA release I am using.
• The mapping functionality only seems to allow you to view one person at a time. It would be interesting to have multiple people selected and have it zoom to the right level to show where they live relative to each other. Also would be helpful to show families in the same area.
• I'll have to play with this a bit more, but it seemed to "import" my data as though it were an external format even though it was a Family Tree Maker file (v16). I understand this is necessary at times, but some data seems to have not been imported. This could very easily be my fault - I'm using a play version of my data. I'll copy a good file and try again.

There is lots more to see and do, this is just my initial impression. I'll write more as I get to know this version a bit better. Here is the link of you want to try it yourself.

Family Tree Maker 2008 BETA