{"id":2873,"date":"2016-12-08T10:35:07","date_gmt":"2016-12-08T17:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/?p=2873"},"modified":"2016-12-08T10:35:07","modified_gmt":"2016-12-08T17:35:07","slug":"an-open-letter-on-rootsmagics-sync-with-ancestry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/?p=2873","title":{"rendered":"An Open Letter on RootsMagic’s Sync with Ancestry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago (back in the Family Origins days) I got burned giving a date for a feature we were adding, and I promised myself I would never do that again. \u00a0But users dislike uncertainty and like\u00a0to press us for an estimated release date. \u00a0Usually, I just say something like “it will be done when it is ready” and leave it at that. \u00a0When Ancestry and RootsMagic announced our agreement<\/a> to create a version of RootsMagic which would be able to sync with Ancestry trees and display WebHints from Ancestry, we were bombarded with the question of “when?” \u00a0We usually don’t pre-announce upcoming features, but with this being a joint public announcement, the questions just kept coming.<\/p>\n

So, apparently not having learned my lesson, we picked the end of the year as a safe guess, even though we had no idea what the brand new API (the system that lets RootsMagic and Ancestry talk with each other) would be like, what problems we might encounter along the way, or what other non-related issues might temporarily take us away. \u00a0We’ve worked with API’s before, and have gotten pretty dang good at it. \u00a0We’ve even written code to sync with online trees (FamilySearch), so we’re experienced there as well. \u00a0And up until very recently, it still looked like we could meet that deadline.<\/p>\n

But to be honest, I underestimated the amount of time necessary to finish and properly test this awesome new feature.<\/p>\n