iHeritage – Genealogy App for the iPad

I’ve been wondering when a dedicated genealogy application (“app”) or software would be available for the new Apple iPad which launched yesterday. I didn’t expect too much at first – it took a bit for genealogy apps on the iPhone to build up steam, and technically some/all genealogy apps that are available for the iPhone and iPod Touch *should* work on the iPad so there certainly isn’t a lack of genealogy software at this point. Online genealogy websites or software that don’t rely on Adobe’s Flash should work just fine as well on the iPad. When I say dedicated, I mean one that is going to take advantage of the iPad’s resolution and/or performance.

Low and behold, there is in fact a dedicated genealogy app for the Apple iPad – it’s called iHeritage from Our Mountain of Ideas. It’s available now for $2.99 and you’ll have to access it through the App Store. I didn’t see it before now since a lot of the iPad apps weren’t made available in the App Store until this weekend.

Unfortunately I don’t have an iPad to test it out at the moment – I’m waiting for the 3G-equipped iPad that’s due out later this month. Don’t ask me how I’m holding out – it’s tough, I got to play with an iPad earlier today and was quite impressed.

I also can’t tell you much about it – the App Store description is lacking. What I can tell you is that it requires an iPad and it runs on iPhone OS 3.2 or later. Once we hear more from the developers, we’ll let you know.

It does look to be more of a “visual” style of app, and a lightweight genealogy app at that. All of the data maybe contained in the iPad itself. It may also require all of the data to be entered on the iPad. I don’t want to judge too harshly since I know very little about it, but from what I’m seeing it’s just a fun little visual app that maybe more suitable to non-genealogists. If it supported GEDCOMs or linking to other genealogy software or websites, I would have thought they might have mentioned it.