Sunday, March 3, 2013

Scythebill 9.1.0 - imports and alternate names

Scythebill 9.1.0 is now available.

There's two major new features - but perhaps more important are some significant bug fixes.  On Windows and Linux, the Cut/Copy/Paste menu items have been quite broken - they've always appeared as disabled.  (The Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V shortcuts have always worked, but it was hard to know.)  This should be resolved.  If you're still having any problems, please let me know.   Thanks to Elena V. for the bug report!

Now, for the fun stuff...

Scythebill has long been missing any way to import data - I've done some one-offs for those bold enough to ask (and thank you to those who did!).  Now, at last, there's an Import menu option (in the File menu).  Scythebill 9.1.0 can import from the following formats:

  • Avisys CSV export
  • eBird CSV export
  • Scythebill's own CSV export
I'd like to add more, but I need samples!  If you have any examples of different formats, please let me know.

Also, Scythebill now has a wealth of alternate names - over 7400 alternate common names, and a couple of hundred alternate scientific names - that you can use while entering species in either IOC or Clements.  So if you know Gavia immer as Great Northern Diver, go ahead and type "grnd" or whatever abbreviation you want - Scythebill will find it.  It'll still show up on your list as the IOC - Great Northern Loon - or Clements - Common Loon - name, though - this just makes it much easier to enter your sightings or browse the species list.

Smaller fixes and changes:
  • The MacOS version failed to start altogether if it was in a directory or drive containing a space!  Ugh.  (This also meant that Scythebill would not start if it was launched from the downloaded disk image, and has been broken since 9.0.2.)
  • The Export... option now includes Index and City columns, and a glitch with backslash characters in descriptions has been fixed.
  • Pasting text into fields was generally broken.
  • Some additional corrections have been made to the Clements taxonomy, all reassigning subspecies to more closely adhere to IOC - all appears to be errors by Cornell.

As always, if you have any issues with Scythebill, please let me know, either by email or on the issue tracker.  Cheers!