Sorry it has taken us so long to publish this update to the Life Browser prototype. We’ve been through a number of internal versions. In hind site, we should have pushed some of those and gotten your feedback. We’ll be more diligent at publishing the updates in the future.

We’ve done a pretty major overhaul to the Life Browser. There are still many features that are ‘stubbed out’ but hopefully you can get a feel for where we are going. Here’s what’s new:

• You can create your own life pages! Be aware however that they won’t be saved after your session. This means that if you leave the site and come back any work you did before will be gone. We hope to be able to store life pages in the future. We’ve also considered a version that let’s you save them on your own computer.
• Artifact Palette. We’ve reworked the page and placed a palette of artifacts on the left hand side of the page.
• Add Artifacts. From the Artifact Palette, you can add more artifacts. Give it a try.
• Artifact Viewer. The artifact viewer lives on the right hand side of the screen. The idea is that anytime you want to view an artifact (no matter what context you’re in) the viewer slides out from the right and slides back to the right when you’re finished.
• Evidence. Once an artifact has been added, it can also be used as supporting evidence for genealogical conclusions about a person. Just drag and click the artifact from the artifact palette and drop it on the conclusion it supports.
• Placeholders. We’ve put in placeholders for timelines, maps, and discussion boards about a person. These are currently just images but hopefully will give you a feel for our general direction.

These are just some of the additions to the life browser. There is still a lot we’d like to do. We also have a lot of questions about the additions to this version so PLEASE use the feedback link to tell us what you think.

We’ve added on to the Life Browser! If you’ll recall, the last version of the Life Browser (v0.2) was basically a gallery of artifacts about a person. Version 0.25 adds a summary page and a details page to the mix. We’ve also made a few enhancements and fixed some defects on the gallery page.

Summary Page

The summary page is intended to provide a brief overview of the person and offer a sampling of the information available about that person (kind of like a sample platter).To be honest, we’re not totally happy with the summary page. We like the content and yet the page seems to be lacking something. If you have ideas on how to spice it up we’d love to know.

Details Page

The details page is where you can find all of the ‘classic’ genealogical details about a person. One of our primary intents with this page is to do a clear mapping between the details and the sources (located in the gallery) that support those details. We’d love to hear your feedback on this. Please use the feedback links to share your insights.

As I type, Jason is promoting our next version of the Life Browser to the site. Over the past few weeks we’ve received some great feedback. THANK YOU! A lot of people send us feedback just to tell us they like what we’re doing. Your encouragement and kind words are very motivating. We also get substantial feedback on things that aren’t working or suggestions for tweaks, enhancements, new features, etc.

By far the most common feedback we received on Life Browser v0.1 was that people were having a hard time seeing the images at the resolution they wanted. They couldn’t find the controls for full screen, zoom or magnifying things (we seem to have hidden these in the UI). The primary changes in this new release are an attempt to improve the ease of viewing things.

As always, use the feedback links to let us know what you like, hate or to share your great ideas.

We’ve put the very first release of the Life Browser up on the site. Take a look and tell us what you think. This first version is very much a conceptual mock-up. Many of the buttons don’t work. We hope that you will click around and let us know what you think of the concept. Over the coming weeks we’ll work to turn this into more of a functioning application.

We haven’t been updating the site or the blog for a while and some of you are starting to wonder what happened to the FamilySearch Labs team. Don’t worry, we are still here working on innovative family history technologies. In fact, we offer the following team photo as evidence that we are still here.

(L to R: Joe ‘running man’ Martel, Jason ‘ice cream’ Butterfield, Grant ‘the rock’ Skousen, Dan ‘just Dan’ Lawyer, Judy ‘mini – as in cooper’ Rice)

A couple of posts ago we spoke of some future enhancements to the pedigree viewer. We still intend to add those enhancements but have decided to shift gears for a while and focus on a different part of the experience. We’re calling this next piece of the puzzle a Life Browser. We hope to have the first version available on the site in the next few weeks.

The Life Browser is intended to provide an experience that makes it easy and interesting to share and explore the lives of our family members. While the genealogical details of our ancestors are essential, they often don’t communicate much about who these people were. Genealogical data provides a basic skeleton of someone’s existence and the Life Browser puts meat on the bones.

The basic approach is to help people tell about their relatives through pictures, records, stories, audio, and video. Our hope is to create an experience that makes people want to explore and learn more about their ancestors. If you’ve had similar ideas or have seen good examples of something like this, leave a comment and let us know about it.