Custom checklists
Scythebill now lets you build your own checklists, and share them with your fellow Scythebill users. I'll tell you more about it in another post (I'm rushing a bit to get this out before the new year), but here's a quick teaser. All you need to do to build a checklist for a location is:
- Click "Create checklist..."
- Choose "Use copy-and-paste auto-magic?"
- Find a webpage or PDF anywhere on the web - think checklists or trip reports - and paste its text in
- Click "Start"
That's it! Scythebill will find all the species named in the text (common or scientific).
Once you've created checklists, you can save them as a .csv file and share them with other users.
If you'd like to play around with an example, you can download a checklist for San Francisco city and open it using "Import checklists..." in the File menu.
An important bugfix
In some unusual circumstances, Scythebill could "forget' some of its entered locations. This resulted in a scary warning about corrupted files. If you haven't seen this error message, you are not affected, don't worry.
The underlying issue has been fixed, and Scythebill gracefully handles loading such corrupted files. (You'd lose some location names, but none of the underlying sightings, and Scythebill will tell you if this happens.)
More checklist corrections
Scythebill has another 375 corrections (42 removals, and 333 additions). Please keep the corrections coming ("Verify against checklists...") in the File menu, they're invaluable.
Easier importing (MacOS only)
One for the Mac users: if you've got an eBird .csv file or one of the new shared checklists, you can just drop that file on the Scythebill application (in the Finder or the dock), and it'll be automatically imported.
I try to keep all the features cross-platform, but this one was just easier to implement on Macs (sorry).
Other fixes
- The "New location..." button was broken. (Reported by Richard A.)
- "Verify against checklists..." properly ignores sightings that are marked as "Uncertain identification" or "Not accepted".
- The "Import" and "Export" menu items have shortcut keys now. (Thanks to Tim B. for the suggestion)
- Imports from eBird containing things like "Crow sp." would fail, fixed. (Thanks also to Tim. B for that one)
