Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Scythebill 9.4.0 - IOC 3.5, a world of states, and more

Scythebill 9.4.0 is available!  Download it here, and follow Scythebill on Google+ or Facebook for more updates.

For many, the highlight of this version will be IOC version 3.5 - made available just a few days ago.  There also were some specific issues in Scythebill's IOC 3.4 support that have been resolved - Loggerhead Shrike, Grey-backed Fiscal, and East Andean Antbird are specifically fixed.


My personal favorite new feature is a small one that massively simplifies entering subspecies or eBird groups.  It takes more words to explain than it does to show:

Whenever entering a species, Scythebill will see if you've previously chosen a subspecies for that location (or a nearby one).  If you have, it'll show up automatically in the drop-down list.  




Scythebill 9.4.0 is also much less US-centric than earlier versions.  Scythebill previously created lists with all the countries of the world, but only the states of the United States.  Now, Scythebill has:

  • The states of all the countries in the world
  • The major subdivisions of the United Kingdom - England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man
  • The counties of the United States
  • The counties of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales.  (These are, as I understand it, ceremonial counties for England, council areas in Scotland, and counties or boroughs in Northern Ireland and Wales)
Here's how this feature works:

Scythebill 9.4.0 includes a number of smaller features:
  • You can now rearrange built-in locations to your heart's content.  For example, if you want to build an "East Asia" location for reporting, go to "Browse by Location", create a new location inside Asia, then drag-and-drop China, Japan, South Korea, etc. into East Asia.  Think Texas should be part of Mexico?  It's your call now.  Thanks to Yann M. for the idea.
  • The UI for entering new locations has been cleaned up a bit, and should hopefully be clearer when entering deep hierarchies of locations.
  • You can now enter sightings with no date at all.  Thanks to Keith M. and and Ronald O. for the suggestion.
  • The country codes of Guam and the Canary Islands have been fixed.  (This would have caused issues when importing to eBird.)