Phil Moir's Blog

We're fast approaching Christmas and one of Genes Reunited's busiest times of the year. Since our last release, we have had a significant amount of support from development resources inside brightsolid, but who don't normally work on the Genes Reunited website. They have made a massive amount of change behind the scenes and while not every bug has been fixed, the stability and performance of the site has been much improved. We know there are still some niggles, such as not being able to print your tree, errors still appear for a few, etc., but don't worry these are not being ignored. So what other things have we been doing. Since my last update we have rolled out 3 releases albeit some were minor bug fix releases, but here's what was included:

• Message Centre update - We realised that for some of you with large mailboxes, the new Message Centre changes had a detrimental affect, so we have made some changes behind the scenes to fix this. I would still be interested to hear if anyone is having difficulty in accessing or sending messages. The search mechanism has been improved so that if you search, your search filter remains so that you can narrow it down. When you try to delete a folder and the messages in it, you will now be prompted with a warning. Any email replied to should now be flagged with a reply icon. You can now amend the title of an email on the reply. Messages from Genes were not showing up, and this has also been fixed.

• Home Page improvements - The home page was getting very busy and this was affecting the download speed. We have adjusted a few things, such as remove the videos (they were a bit out of date!), but you can link to the page via the media link under community. This will continue to give access to the videos and photos.

• New Tree in beta - For Platinum and Standard members, we have now released our new tree into Beta. It is still very similar to the old tree, but feedback received has been very encouraging and while it has gone through a complete rewrite this will allow much faster future development and problem resolution.

• Christmas Decorations - A few days late, but we've now added a very subtle change to the logo and the smiley icon has a festive feature.

This may not seem like a huge list of changes, but I suspect you might find it extremely boring for me to go into technical detail about the performance changes. And we have been very busy working on next week's release. I have to leave you in suspense for that!

Best regards, Phil Moir
Genes Reunited, Lead Developer