&app; is a software package designed to help you with genealogical research. It allows you to store, edit, and research genealogical data using your computer. Although similar to other genealogical programs, it offers some unique and powerful features. GRAMPS is an open source software package, which means it's distributed for free. It's developed and maintained by a worldwide team of volunteers. Most genealogy programs allow the researcher to input information related to a family tree. They can usually display descendant or ancestral relationships through graphical displays, charts, or reports. Some allow pictures or other media to be inserted to enhance the raw data. Most provide a means to include data on individuals or families that may or may not be related to the primary family being researched. And they may include other features such as exporting or importing to and from other programs and printing data contained in various reports. &app; has all these capabilities and more. Notably, it allows you to integrate bits and pieces of stray data as the arise from your research and put all this information in one place - your computer. You can then use the speed, power, and accuracy of your computer to store, manipulate, correlate, and analyze your data, rather than messing with reams of paper. &app; has the power to let you rearrange your data in any order or sequence and to help you fill gaps in genealogical relationships. This section lists most notable changes from the previous stable branch of &app;, the 1.0.X. Berkeley database backend The default format for &app; is now the BSDDB database. This change allowed us to overcome performance issues and memory requirements of the 1.0.X branch. With the database backend, the database sizes of up to a hundred thousand people do not present a major obstacle any longer. The default extension for &app; BSDDB database files is grdb. The new format is open and fully documented in the developer's API reference distributed with the source of &app;. A consequence of the new database backend is that the changes, once approved by the user, are applied immediately. In short, once you click OK in the Person, Family, Source, Place, Media object, or Event editor, all the changes made to this object are recorded in the database. No saving is necessary (or even possible). The analog of quitting without saving would be abandoning all changes and quitting. Also, it is possible to undo recent actions. Interface improvements There were numerous changes in the interface. Most of them are subtle and incremental improvements, and all of them cannot be listed here. The most noticeable changes are: Removal of alphabetical tabs Ability to add/remove/rearrange columns in list views Removal of Save function and addition of Undo Proper window management and removal of most modal windows Support for Tip of the Day Person-dependent context menus (right-click) in Pedigree View listing parents, children, spouses, and siblings Export wizard Built-in Find function in list views Date selector dialog Name editor enhancements: patronymic names and non-default grouping Recent file support (both gramps-specific and gnome-wide) Other database backends Along with the BSDDB backend, the in-memory database handling for &app; XML and GEDCOM formats has been added. Simply put, it is now possible to natively open data in those two formats (although the preferred and default format is grdb) and work with that data, without necessarily setting up an empty database and then importing into it. This approach requires holding all data in memory, so it is only useful for small databases (depending on the available memory size). In such mode, the data is automatically saved upon exit, to mimic the functionality of the real database. Please keep in mind that some information in GEDCOM file may be lost during import into &app;. Simply opening and viewing the file will not change it. However, if any changes were made and they were not abandoned upon exit, exiting &app; will save the data, with the possible data loss. Import and Export New import and export filters available for the GeneWeb format. Reports A new report -- Statistics Chart -- has been added to &app;. An overall change of the whole report framework has been accomplished. All reports now remember their options. It is possible to generate reports from the command line, without launching the interactive &app; session. The report API is much simpler now, making it easy to write a custom report. A single code instance may be used for a standalone report, a book item, and a command-line report. Command line The new command line functionality includes opening the filename argument given without any flags, as well as new flags and options for report generation. Also, the addition of new formats leads to additional available format options. Internationalization The approach for entering and displaying dates has been completely re-worked. In particular, the new framework allows for a deeper localization of displayed dates than was ever possible using the translatable strings. The internationalization of names have also been improved. Names can be grouped under a non-default string. Patronymic names are supported, and it is easy to program new ways of displaying names, as may be required by various cultures and languages. Desktop integration All formats known to &app; are now registered as mime types, each with its icon and &app; as a default handler. Double-clicking on a file with any of these formats will launch &app; and open that file. &app; also added support for the recent documents functionality. This is on both the GNOME-wide level and within the &app;. The preferences are now properly stored using GConf, with schemas, partitioning of keys into smaller directories, error checking, and notification. In this book, some words are marked with special typography: Applications Commands you type at the command line Filenames Replaceable text Labels for buttons and other portions of the graphical interface Menu selections look like this: Menu Submenu Menu Item Buttons you can click Anything you type in The manual also provides assorted bits of additional information in tips and notes, as follows. Tips and bits of extra information will look like this. Notes will look like this. Finally, there are warnings, notifying you where you should be careful: This is what a warning looks like. If there's a chance you'll run into trouble, you will be warned beforehand.