Family Tree Maker for Mac is Here

  
Need another gift suggestion for yourself or others? Ancestry.com today announced the availability of Family Tree Maker for Mac. This is not a terribly exciting event for me as I am a PC kind of person. I'm not even a big fan of the PC version of Family Tree Maker which has been around for two decades. I did use it as my primary genealogy software for a while back in the 1990s. However, Family Tree Maker has always been more widely available in the retail marketplace than most of its competitors.
 

Family Tree Maker of Mac continues that exposure. If you are a family history researcher of the Mac persuasion, this could be a game changer. If for no other reason, it will offer stiff competition for Reunion which has long had most of the Mac market to itself. At the very least it should benefit consumers by causing Reunion to be more competitive on price. Still at an introductory price of $69.99, FTM for Mac is still more that twice what comparably featured PC based genealogy programs like RootsMagic and Legacy go for. It's three times the holiday sale price for RootsMagic that I blogged about yesterday.
 

If you have already invested your money and time in a Mac learning curve, FTM is available for purchase online from Ancestry and it is also available in select retail stores, including Apple Stores, Amazon, Office Depot, and Office Max. 
 

Ancestry claims the Mac version is functionally similar to the PC version Family Tree Maker 2010. Interesting, Family Tree Maker 2011 is already being sold for $39.99. Is the Mac version already a version behind or was that a typo?

Genealogy Software for Mac

Until fairly recently the conventional wisdom was that if family history researchers had a Mac their choice of genealogical software was very limited. The options often seemed limited to Reunion or to try to run software that had been designed for PCs. Recently that situation has been changing. New software has become available and announcements indicate other options will soon join them.

If you are looking for genealogy software, a good place to start is MacGenealogy.org. This site had lots of information about genealogy products for the Mac environment and attempts to be impartial. Don't confuse this site with MacGenealogist.com which should be your second stop.

Much of the Mac genealogical community is on hold while awaiting the appearance of Family Tree Maker for Mac which like its PC version is backed by Ancestry.com. This is not to say that this much awaited software will dominate the Mac market. Its long running PC cousin is an important player but does not dominate that market for serious genealogists. The marketing and distribution power of Ancestry will be important as will links within the program to the Ancestry database. The expected release of Family Tree Maker for Mac currently is the end of November. This will be just in time for it to be a holiday gift.

Family Tree Maker has long enjoyed the best retail distribution system among genealogy software programs. At one time The Genealogy Network now Ancestry bought Family Origins but did not develop or market it. This behavior led some to believe this acquisition was made to remove a competitor from the marketplace. After the end of the non-competition clause of the contract in which Family Origins was sold, its original programming team came back together and wrote RootsMagic. RootsMagic built from a foundation of its Family Origins fan base and has become the program of choice of many serious genealogists.

In the near future it will be interesting to see what happens in the marketplace as Ancestry salts Family Tree Maker with little green leaves  that link to content in Ancestry. RootsMagic seems to have aligned itself with the revitalized FamilySearch. After the New FamilySearch opens to non-LDS members in the next several months, RootsMagic will be able to offer similar links to extra content from a powerful partner as well. 2011 should be interesting.