03 March 2016

Upgrade to FTM with MacKiev?

Interested in what's happening with Family Tree Maker now taken over by MacKiev?

There's an FAQ including:








Also
- a free update to FTM 2014 will be available soon,
- users of FTM 2012 or Mac 2 or earlier will be able to upgrade to the new versions for $29.95 (vs. regular price $69.95),
- to receive the upgrade offer on 4 March sign up via the link at www.mackiev.com/ftm/index.html

2 comments:

Terry Mulcahy said...

John,

What about us old fogies who still like using FTM Version 16, which Ancestry stopped supporting a year ago. From what I see, there are many of us all over the world who have never upgraded from that version when Vista first came on the scene.

Terry Mulcahy

John McConkey said...

MacKiev have changed the output file format with their version of FTM (which they call Family Tree Maker 2014.1). This seems to be the main difference between Ancestry's version and theirs. This new format is able to do a TreeSync with Ancestry so Ancestry currently supports 3 sync formats: 2012 (which I'm using), 2014 and 2014.1. I suspect on Dec 31 this year Ancestry will drop support of all but 2014.1 format which means if you want to continue using FTM and sync with your Ancestry tree you'll be forced to upgrade to MacKiev's version (which is free for existing 2014 users but not for 2012 users). On the other hand RootsMagic has an agreement with Ancestry that allows it to provide the TreeSync feature so this must mean they will generate the same output format as MacKiev. I took advantage of the RootsMagic 7 deal at Christmas time and have tried it out. I think it's at least as powerful as FTM if not more. It's also not so much of a cpu and memory hog as FTM. I'll wait and see how this pans out but I suspect by this time next year I will have migrated my desktop tree to RM. Tamura Jones has written a good analysis of the situation here: http://www.tamurajones.net/SoftwareMacKievFamilyTreeMaker2014.xhtml