recommendations for autobiography/memoir/family history software

April 23, 2004 1:23 AM

Give my parents some recommendations for autobiography/memoir/family history software. [mi]

Some years back I got my parents a copy of My Life after I read some decent reviews of it. Unfortunately the software has a horrible interface, which isn't ideal for parents who sometimes click on the wrong thing. Also, it looks like the company sold the life.com domain to Life magazine at some point. I'm guessing that the software is pretty dead support-wise. After a lengthy break from the program, my mom is starting to poke around My Life again. I'd like to get her on a different path.

Do you have any recommendations for similar autobiography-related software that is parents-friendly? Either Mac or Win. The best thing about My Life is that it contained about 50K questions that branched off of main sections. It also allowed publishing to the web, although I'm not too interested in that kind of feature at the moment. It's more important to be able to export the written text to plain text or to other programs.

What I'm not looking for:

- general books on writing family histories and memoirs (unless you know of especially good books on this topic)
- software that is primary focused on family genealogy/tree matters

posted by gluechunk to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I'm not too clear on the feature requirements. What special software is required to write something? I can see how a series of questions would be a good stimulus for writing a life history, but I'm not clear on what you need the program to actually do. Does it need to ask the questions, and store the answers in some special way? I'm not clear why this is better than just sitting at a word processor with a printed list of questions at your side. Do you want the memoir to take on some kind of branching-path structure? Do you need to add pictures and sound? Do you want to software to process all the answers and output them with some interesting calculations performed? Or are you just looking for a new set of questions to work from?
posted by scarabic at 10:44 AM on April 23, 2004