Review of OrchidWiz

Review by Manuel Aybar

By Alex Maximiano. OrchidWiz, LLC, Miami. Version 4.03 (March 2008). The software includes two months of technical support. Updates can be purchased in packages of four, annually, for $80 as part of the Annual Maintenance and Update Plan that also includes technical support for the year. Updates come out every three months. $259.

For the last 80 years, the orchid world has experienced the most amount of activity as far as hybridization is concerned. Some say that there are more orchid hybrids registered than all other flowering groups of plants combined. With this said, the tracking of the lines of breeding becomes a daunting task for the hybridizers, orchid judges or any orchid enthusiast.

Alex Maximiano, the president and founder of OrchidWiz.

Before the era of widely available computer software, the list of Sander’s List of Orchid Hybrids was the one source of reference for tracing lines of breeding and progeny of orchids. Now, there are several pieces of software that help with orchid-breeding documentation. Most of them also add American Orchid Society (AOS) award references, as well as Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and Cymbidium Society of America awards. These are: Wildcatt Database, AQ Plus (Formerly e-AOS, the AOS electronic version of  Awards Quarterly) and the new kid on the block, OrchidWiz, the main focus of this review. (Version 4.03 is reviewed here, but as of March 2009, Version 5.03 has been issued.) A new major version is released each June; updates are then provided quarterly.

THE GEEKY STUFF Lets sort out the geeky stuff about OrchidWiz. The software comes in a DVD-R, and it requires the user to have Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista and 1.3 GB of disk space. Nowadays, with newer computers having big hard drives, space is not an issue. If you don’t have a DVD-R reader drive and need CD-ROMs instead, call the company to make arrangements to have the CD-ROM delivered. If you don’t understand this geeky stuff, don’t worry and keep reading. When you acquire the software, you receive instructions on how to install it and get it running.

MENU ITEMS OrchidWiz comes with menus that allow you to access the basic functions of the software: Search, List, Articles, Calculate, Tools, Windows and Help. We will focus on showing how to access the basic functions of the software, not by using the menus, but by using the main software interface when you launch the application.

SOFTWARE INTERFACE I have great respect for all OrchidWiz predecessors. One must recognize that most of the software has been a great aide compared to the times where we only had Sander’s (as a book) in the orchid world. As an engineer, I give kudos to OrchidWiz in the development of the actual software interface. As an early adopter, I have witnessed what good programming is all about: Having an interface for the end-user that is easy to use, friendly and anyone can figure it out without having to read the user’s manual.

When you install the software and open it for the first time, you are presented with several boxes of criteria (genus, orchid name, originator, group, registration period, etc.) with which you could start browsing.

The easiest way to start your research for a species or cross is to go to the box marked “Orchid Name” (the box is highlighted in yellow for ease of identification). Key in a couple of letters of the cross. Note that there is a radio button that you can select if you want to start searching with “starting with,” “contains,” “ends with” or “exact match.” I have my copy of OrchidWiz set to “containing” because it is easier to search for any type of string (I usually remember parts of the cross, not the full name). The software defaults to the last radio button selection you picked.

When you select a cross, such as searching for “Phalaenopsis Golden Peoker,” go to the orchid name box and type “Golden P” (no quotes), and you will get a list for everything that has “Golden P.” The results are not limited to the genus Phalaenopsis. This is neat because the indexing of the tables is not separated by groups of genera, so you don’t have to jump from group to group to find a particular cross.

Screen for Phalaenopsis Gold Peoker (Misty Green × Liu Tuen-Shen).

Once you select a cross, in our case, Phalaenopsis Golden Peoker, you will be presented on the right-hand side of the screen with a picture of the cross or species (if an image is available; all OrchidWiz pictures are from contributors, not AOS official award pictures). The interface also adds a number of buttons that you can click on for information: Genus, Originator, Awards (the most handy for judges), F₁ offspring, Cultivation, Metrics, Images, Pedigree, Image References, Genealogy, Text Tree, Image Tree, depending on what information is available.

The Genus Button (also accessed by pressing F2 on your keyboard) allows you to pull information on the genus in question (in our example, Phalaenopsis) and shows relationships and crosses made between the researched genus and other genera.

The Originator Button lists information on the originator of the cross (address, Web site, e-mail, etc.).

The Awards Button is probably the most used by AOS judges and anyone interested in researching awards given to a particular species or cross. Once you find the cross you are looking for, if there are any awards to it, you will be presented with this button. (If there are no awards for the cross you are looking for, this button will be unavailable to click.) Once you click this button, in our case, you will be presented with a list of awards. The F₁ Offspring Button allows you to look at the first-generation hybrids made with the cross in question. The Metrics Session looks at the averages for the awards given to both parents and estimates the sizes for the cross in question.

The Cultivation Button pulls a screen based on the species composition and generates a recommended light and temperature analysis with recommendations for the care of the particular cross. It also comes up with a watering and growing medium recommendation. I think this is useful for the novice grower as a starting point.

The Pedigree Button shows a list of ancestors and number of generations, while the Text Tree and Image Tree buttons show the genealogy tree in text and graphical format, the latter if there are pictures of the species and hybrids available. The Genealogy Button shows, in a pie-chart format, the composition of the species for the cross. This is especially useful to the judging community and some aficionados because it gives the ability to determine how the species influenced the hybrid in question.

Two functions I think a lot of potential users will like are the Image Button and the Image Reference Button. The Image Button allows you to look at images or the hybrid or species in question, if available. Those pictures are not official award pictures from the American Orchid Society. The Image Reference Button lists the sources of where you can find pictures for the species or hybrid researched.

OVERALL IMPRESSION For me, being a discriminating computer software user (Disclaimer: That’s what I do for a living), I think that OrchidWiz is a well-written piece of software. I was one of the early adopters and registered user of the software, and I have seen the continuous improvement of the software through its revisions. The programmer(s) for this company did a good job indexing the databases, so the searches are fast and accurate. I have found few errors in the software, but since humans fed the information into the program, at some point you might run into one misspelling or so. When I found a typo a year ago, I corresponded via e-mail with OrchidWiz, and it was corrected in the next revision. That’s the commitment I am talking about.

Myriad color photographs, graphs and detailed text are highlights of OrchidWiz, as illustrated by this screen about temperatures for Cypripedium reginae.

The many features of the software are appealing to the power user, but might seem daunting to the basic computer user at the beginning. Don’t worry if you are not a geek like me. The software is easy to use. Period. The Help Menu is well written, and the contents on the Help Menu cover all the features and explain how to use the software. It never ceases to amaze me how people complain about software that they can’t use, but they never look at the Help Menu when they don’t know how to do something. Help menus in applications have come a long way, so give them a shot when you find yourself stuck.

The list of references is by far the most comprehensive I have seen in any software. The fact that you can get a list of picture references and search the articles from Orchids magazine (formerly AOS Bulletin) and also the Orchid Digest Corporation (ODC) articles pays for the software right away. When I was a student judge, I spent countless hours looking for articles, magazine by magazine. This feature would have helped me a lot at that time (hint, hint student judges). Well done, OrchidWiz.

I would like to see some other features such as Boolean searches that Wildcatt has. (Boolean searches give the ability to cross reference two hybrids and find the combined progeny of both.) When you have that many records to search, if you do so, it can slow down the searches.

Color photographs clearly illustrate the parents and ancestors of Thwaitesara Denver Gold (Free Spirit × Rsc. Sunday).

In an ideal world, I would like to see more integration with the AQ Plus software. What I am talking about is the ability to pull AOS award pictures from OrchidWiz. In my case, as an AOS judge, I pay for both pieces of software: OrchidWiz because I like the interface and it is easy to use, and AQ Plus because of the official AOS award pictures. I think that a lot of us would happily pay for both copies if there was such integration.

AOS is going away from publishing the Awards Quarterly magazine, and it is more practical to just haul a computer to the many orchid shows I get invited to judge instead of relying on the shows to have copies of Awards Quarterly handy. In my computer, I keep copies of all the software that is out there.

Overall, I think OrchidWiz has filled a niche for orchid reference software. The many features make it useful to own. It is targeted to be used by everyone that has an interest in orchids: hobbyist, advance users, hybridizers, novice growers, and last but not least, AOS judges. OrchidWiz is here to stay, and many of us have welcomed and embraced the software and have it as an essential tool in our orchid judging kit, right next to our Excel spreadsheet or spiral notebook where we keep our notes and our plant collection lists. — Manuel Aybar is former industrial engineer at Texas Instruments Inc. and now a director for Fastteks Computer Services in the Dallas, Texas, area. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he has been growing orchids for approximately 15 years. The genus that got him started was Dendrobium. Today, he specializes in phalaenopsis-type dendrobiums. Manuel is an AOS accredited judge and has been a member of the Society since 1997.