Dealing with these types of unforeseen issues is a fact of life in the software development industry. Correcting or working around these issues have used up substantial amounts of time. However, some of the development tools and products being used in this effort have not delivered the level of quality you deserve. We have maintained top-notch user support throughout the effort.
This has been a long and exhausting process for a small company such as Ancestral Systems, LLC.
Since 2014, we have been working on a total rewrite of the program to support more flexible development of document templates and use of document data, and allow the program to run on both Windows and Mac OS X computers (without special virtual Windows environments). Here are just a few of the highlights during the lifetime of Clooz 3: A steady stream of new features and capabilities in Clooz has continued since then. It’s been nearly seven years since Clooz 3.0 was first publicly released in July 2012. Ability for users to edit / create report formats.Ability for users to edit / create document templates.Versions of Clooz for mobile devices allowing retrieval of information and photographic capture of documents.Additional new reports and options for user customization.Improvements and new features to support interactive analysis of document content (assisting in the proper identification of people mentioned in a document, building of relationships between people).Add ability to group document lists by geographic area.Integration with online services such as Dropbox for moving Clooz data between user systems.Interfaces to online data repositories for finding and downloading document information.Import / Export capability to external spreadsheet files.Expansion of direct interfaces to other genealogical software.Tool for moving data from one template type to another (such as from a Generic Document to a new more specific document type).Ideas under consideration for the future:
The list below describes our goals, and should not be considered a commitment. Meanwhile, we will continue to add in the missing pieces and when the program is fully functional and tested, it will be officially released. While these developmental versions are not yet ready for actual research use, it is a great way to have your feedback and ideas reflected in future releases. Send email requests to if you are interested in receiving further information. We continue to invite current Clooz 3 users to join in this testing effort. It did however provide a glimpse of the new features we are very excited about, and it was well received by the testers.
This developmental release was only a partial implementation of the full set of Clooz functionality required for official release. On December 1, 2019, the first developmental version of Clooz 4 was released for early testing to a small group of Clooz 3 users. In the meantime, Clooz does operate fine on Mac computers under virtual Windows environments such as VMWare Fusion and Parallels. It remains possible that there may be a Mac OS X version further out in time, but for now, the initial implementation of version 4 is now focused entirely on Windows. Unfortunately, after years of effort we came to the conclusion that a Mac OS X version of Clooz was beyond our limited resources. Our original goal was to support both Windows and Mac OS X computers (without special virtual Windows environments). Since 2014, we have been working on a total rewrite of the program to support more flexible development of document templates and use of document data.