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.)
