Author: M M

Welcome to our first Newsletter for 2023

No, you didn’t miss out on any news in the 9 months since the last issue, but a lot has been happening! As you’ll read below, the programmers have been busy. It is worth noting that the actual “design, construct and initial test” process is shared between volunteers in South Australia, Victoria and Norway – so there’s lots of communication to and fro, which all adds small delays at each step. Our volunteer Alpha Testers are located in Australia, Canada and Germany.

Not only does HRE aim to import TMG data (hopefully with all the user customisations intact) but it also adds enhancements and more features. This all takes time but it is really moving closer to the desired outcome every week.

Note also that during this period, due to cost impositions by our previous distribution service, these newsletters are now being despatched through HubSpot.

What’s Been Happening:

HRE development has continued across a range of items.

These can be summarised as follows.

HRE screens:

• All screens can now be concurrently accessed/updated across multiple projects
• All imported Events are now properly represented in Person and Viewpoint screens.
• Name Styles are not only fully imported from TMG but can now be correctly converted to the more capable HRE Name Style format for use in Person and Location management screens. HRE Name Styles implement multi-language capability and a virtually unlimited number of name components

TMG Import:

• HRE now handles the import of internal and external Text files and non-standard text formats (like PDF, ODT, etc) for People, Locations and Events
• HRE now imports all TMG Flags and their settings. Included in the HRE implementation of Flags is the ability for Flag settings to be greater than a single character.

General:

• We have continued with other general improvements in the areas of performance, continued multi-language screen support and additional Help screens.

HRE Presentations

We presented an overview of the HRE development progress at the RUG (Roots User Group) in April this year and will be presenting at TMG Down Under (in Australia) in September.

HRE screens:

The Viewpoint screens are now fully populated. They also interact with each other and with the ‘picklist’ screens. As the user can have up to 5 Viewpoints open at once, this allows, for example, the HRE Place Viewpoint to remain open and in view while other data is explored, compared etc. in other Viewpoints. We have implemented ‘Manage Person’ and ‘Manage Location’ screens, (excluding update capability)
And also added draft screens for Event management.

TMG Import:

HRE now imports TMG image thumbnails and TMG Name Styles, along with the associated data.

Translations:

Screen and Help pages now support Spanish, Italian and English(UK). Multi-System: Execution has now been tested under newer versions of Linux.

Name Styles:

TMG Name Styles are now fully imported and can be managed by the user.

Voluntary Effort:

We are seeking volunteers to help with English/Spanish and English/Italian translation of HRE headings, Help files etc. Please reply if you are willing to assist.
Note that all work on the HRE project has, to date, been completely voluntary, and when the program is publicly released it is not intended to charge for the software.

HRE Presentations:

We presented an overview of the HRE development progress at the RUG (Roots User Group) in April and TMG Down Under (in Australia) in October. The feedback from these sessions continues to be positive, which is re-assuring. A further presentation to RUG is planned for April 2023.

What’s Been Happening

Translations

A huge effort by our volunteer translators now allows HRE to present all the Project management screens (and a few others), as well as their associated Help screens, in English, French, German and Norwegian.
We would like to expand the current group of translators to include further languages – especially Dutch, Italian and Spanish. So if you have any skills in these languages, or any other, please let us know through the HRE website’ Volunteer’ page at https://historyresearchenvironment.org/become-a-volunteer/

Multi-User

We have worked on exploiting the various access modes provided by our chosen database software (H2) and as a result we have built into HRE the ability to start up in ‘server mode’ to support multi-client access to an HRE database.

HRE Installation Process

We revised the install package creation process, so now you don’t need to install Java on your system in order to run HRE – in fact you won’t even be aware you are running a Java-based program. This also makes HRE portable – you can now run it from a USB stick plugged into any Windows PC.

Multi-System

One of the HRE design objectives was that HRE would execute natively on Windows, Linux and macOS. The change in the install package method has enabled us to more easily build installation packages for all 3 OS’s. The install process and subsequent HRE execution has now been tested under Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) and macOS 10.15 (Catalina).

Meanwhile….

Development work has continued on revising the current database structure to create a more effective base for the import of Person Names and Location data with additional HRE Name Style functionality.

HRE Presentations

We presented an overview of the HRE development progress at the 12 Dec 2020 meeting of RUG (Roots User Group) followed by a similar presentation to the TMG Down Under group (based in Australia) in March. The feedback from these sessions has been positive, which is re-assuring to the development team.
An update to RUG is planned for their July 2021 meeting, so if you want to hear the very latest news, see the details at http://www.rootsusers.org/ – click on ‘RUG Meeting Presentations’ in the left sidebar and you’ll find HRE presentations in the ‘Downloads of RUG Meeting Presentations‘ list at Dec 12, 2020 and July 10, 2021.