GEDitCOM's developer, John Nairn. seeks to provide a genealogy program that is powerful, easy to use, customizable, and that fully supports the GEDCOM Standard. With the first version he succeeded: with GEDitCOM II he has far exceeded the original: it's easier to use, easier to customize, and is also very attractively presented.

I used MacFamily Tree for a while and tried out Reunion and Heredis before settling on the earlier version of GEDitCOM. The others were prettier and had fancier charts but they also had far too many idiosyncrasies, mishandled GEDCOM Standards (creating problems in transferring information to other people), and they were very inflexible: you get what you're given!

You can use GEDitCOM "out of the box", but It took me some time to learn how to tweak its interface to suit the way I want to use it. I expected to jump straight into version II, so I was initially surprised by the differences in customizing it, but after less than two weeks I'm feeling more in control and I have it set up very much to my own liking: no doubt I'll continue to fiddle around at the edges.

This is only the first post-beta release of GEDitCOM II and John Nairn acknowledges that there is still work to be done. I've already got a (short) wish-list, which I'll pass on to him. My comment on the original GEDitCOM, four years ago, was "If you want to create some serious genealogical records and not just set out a short family tree in a pretty pictorial format, then this program must be the best". The best just got a whole lot better.