Saturday, October 26, 2019

Scythebill 14.7.4 - eBird import is fixed, and better Multiple Observer support

Scythebill 14.7.4 is now available, with some critical fixes to get eBird imports working once more and an improvement to Multiple Observer support.  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

eBird import fixes

At some point in the last week or so, eBird changed the name of the column header containing species comments in both their Checklist and MyData export formats.  This broke Scythebill, which relies on those column header names to find the data.

(Scythebill should also have given a better error message than it did, instead of just saying the .csv file might not be valid.)

This has been fixed, so new files (and old files) should import cleanly.

Multiple Observer improvement

Scythebill added support for recording sightings for multiple observers in a single .bsxm file back in 14.0.0.  If you've never seen it - and want to use it - you can check out the section in the Scythebill manual that explains it.  (If you don't need this feature, don't worry about it - it's well-hidden, and none of it appears at all unless you go to the Scythebill Preferences page and turn it on.)

New to 14.7.4, though, is a quick way to toggle between those observers for all the reporting Scythebill gives you.  Now, just to the right of the Taxonomy chooser up top, is an Observer field, where you can pick a single observer:


As soon as you've done so, all the sightings will automatically be filtered to just that one observer - whether you're in Show reports, Browse by location, Browse by species, any of the Special reports, or even the "Remembered" reports whose totals show up on the main menu page.  You can always leave it blank to get a report for all the observers in your file.


3 comments:

  1. Tks, Adam.
    How nice it is to have someone continuously working on improvement.
    It has taken me a long while to get used to this program, but it offers a lot more detail and flexibility in recording sightings.
    I await with anticipation the revision that permits visible photos of the birds recorded in reports.
    At that point, it should become a program/app for which one could happily pay something.

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  2. John, thanks for the kind words... But I've no interest in or plans to every charge for Scythebill. If it's worth anything to you, please consider a donation to a conservation organization.

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  3. Love the changes and thanks for your continuous maintenance to Scythebill!

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