Scythebill 15.7 is now available! It's a smaller releases, with some internal upgrades, lat/long improvements, and a few small fixes. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
15.7.1 was released on June 12th with a fix for MacOS only (writing CSVs failed)
15.7.2 was released on June 20th with a few more small fixes; ABA region reports were broken in 15.7.0 for about half of users, and saving as a spreadsheet failed for MacOS.
15.7.3 was released on July 12th with several more fixes:
- Non-US MacOS users saw incorrect date formats in some places.
- The German translation is much improved, thanks to a recent contribution from M. Johanning.
- Trip reports will now include sighting descriptions even when there are multiple locations for a single species.
- BirdBase imports should do a far better job of handling descriptions that contain double-quote characters.
- Observado imports now automatically distinguish between Luxembourg-the-country, and Luxembourg-the-province-of-Belgium.
Java upgrade
Scythebill runs on top of the Java platform. You don't have to know that - it packages Java internally, so you don't need to install Java. But it's been awhile since I've updated that internally packaged version, and I've jumped from Java 10 to Java 17. What does this mean to most of you? Nothing! But - it does make me a bit more worried about compatibility problems and odd bugs than I am with most releases. Please do let me know if you see anything going wrong - especially if you're running an older operating system.
Lat/long improvements
Scythebill is better at loading latitude and longitude for locations from Google's APIs.
Show reports now lets you generate reports within a number of miles or kilometers of another location. A word of caution: this only supports locations with latitude and longitude, and assumes that all sightings at that location have exactly that latitude and longitude.
To make this a bit easier, in Browse by location, Scythebill now shows a small green place-marker next to locations that have a latitude and longitude, to make it easier to find locations that should have one but don't.
Smaller fixes
- Scythebill doesn't support eBird taxa like "Gull sp.", and drops those on import. It now tells you that it's done so.
- The IOC checklist substituted "South American" for the abbreviation "SA" more often than it should. Specifically, SA often meant South Australia; that mistaken substitution is now fixed.
- BirdBrain imports that referenced state codes ("AZ" instead of Arizona) are now much better supported.
- Renaming a location that had an attached custom checklist would inadvertently delete the checklist!
- An error noticed by a few users after hitting the "Back" button from the "New Location" page during "Enter sightings" has been fixed.