A long time ago, I had been a fan of Family Tree Maker. After switching to a Mac some years ago, I was disappointed that there was no version of FTM. When they finally released FTM for Mac, I was one of the first in line. I was especially anticipating the product because they claimed it was "built from the ground up." They flat-out lied and misrepresented the product.

FTM for Mac is a port of the PC product that runs on Mono, a framework that allows applications compiled for Windows to run on the Mac. There are several problems with this when it comes to a data and internet intensive program like FTM. The amount of memory it takes to run the program through the Mono emulator makes it impossible to run any other application at the same time. This application uses more than twice the memory of the next memory hog, Firefox. I have seen FTM use up to 2GB of memory!
Another issue it has crashed every single time I have used it. Every. Single. Time. This again has much to do with the fact that it is not a native application and is not properly accessing low-level functions that handle memory.

If I had known that Ancestry.com just asked their C# programmers to find a way to make their program work on a Mac instead of hiring developers who know how to program Objective-C, I would not have bought the product.

It is pretty much useless to me until Ancestry.com owns up to their claim of "built from the ground up," and makes things right for their Mac-using brethren.

Signed,
Jeramie Hammond
User of Ancestry.com for over 12 years.