Marcelo Calbucci

    The last few weeks have been really hard. I wanted to tell the people about our new feature but couldn't. This is one of the reasons that my blog has been at a low post per week rate and why the Sampa blog has been numb for more than a month. Sampa didn't even send the monthly newsletter in July (why bother our customers if we didn't have anything new to say?)

    Anyway, now the Sampa Family Tree is out there you can check it out.

    First of all, this is not your father's family tree (no pun intended). This is a new generation of family tree. Before, and for a millenia or more, family trees have been about how many generations back can you go, your pedigree, data that was only interesting for the Family Tree geek type.

    The new Family Tree is about the connecting the family. Is about having contact information for the members of the tree so they can easily access the family address book.

    Here are some of the highlights of the Sampa Family Tree:

• You can start your family tree by importing your Address Book.
• You have a Wizard that let you quickly start your family tree up to 4 generations in a single screen.
• Anyone can edit people's information or add new persons to the tree.
• Contrary to other Family Trees, all changes are moderated by the site owner (No 'funny' drunk uncle messing up your tree).
• The Family Address Book can be accessed in a single page, and is protected by our privacy system.
• The Family Tree works on your favorite browser, as well as on your smart phone (iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, etc.)
• Why add just 1 picture per person? You can have a "Picture Story" with up to 3 pictures for the person at different ages. For example, you can have a baby picture, a high-school picture and a thirty-something picture.
• You have multiple Privacy "knobs" for your family tree. Who can see it? Who can edit it? Who can view the address book? etc. It's not an "all-public" or "all-private" thing.

    For the geeks in all of us, here is what doesn't matter:

• The entire tree works with or without JavaScript. That is why you can see on "dumb" browsers, like Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. It basically took two code version, one on the server and one on javascript to make it work.
• The tree navigation is all AJAX.
• I took extra care to make navigation very snappy, by preloading necessary information, delay loading unnecessary and minimizing the number and size of HTTP requests.
• We still have lots of features to add. The list is long.
• Take a special look at the "Lookup Person" functionality. People will appear as you start typing the names insanely fast. How? No server call.

    The features clearly missing are:

• Import/Export family tree
• Geo-tagging (where was each person born, where she lives now)
• Different view modes for the tree
• Marriage information (date, location, etc)

    I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think.