I spent today turning a family research project into a working desktop application with help from Vibe. The project, called September Family Tree, is built with Qt6 on Manjaro Linux and displays generations of family connections in a clean expandable tree with names and TG provenance numbers. I started with a ResearchNodeNetwork graph, corrected several family relationships, added privacy protections for living relatives, and made sure personal information about me was removed before distribution. The finished interface makes a complicated genealogy network much easier to explore because each person appears in context with parents, grandparents, and earlier generations. Behind the scenes, the project also demonstrates how AI-assisted software development can turn structured research data into a practical visual application while keeping public and private information separated.
Once the application was working, I took it beyond a normal local program and prepared it for modern Linux software distribution. I created Flatpak and Snap packages, tested the Flatpak, installed and tested the Snap, committed the packaging files to GitHub, and then registered september-family-tree with the Snap Store. The Snap successfully became revision 1, giving the project a path from source code to an installable application. What I like most about this experiment is that the same basic idea can apply far beyond genealogy: organized information can become an interactive map of relationships, whether those relationships involve people, historical records, properties, research sources, classroom material, or software systems. Vibe helped turn the idea into code, while GitHub, Qt, Flatpak, and Snap provided the pieces needed to transform that code into something other people can eventually install and explore.
Leave a comment