Scythebill 15.8 is now available! Its main feature is the new IOC 13.1 taxonomy, but it also includes a number of smaller improvements. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
Important! Scythebill now has an email list - you can join online at https://groups.google.com/g/scythebill-users/about.
Scythebill 15.8.1 was released on March 4: it fixes eBird imports from the "year list" and "life list" pages, adds support for 11 new IOC languages, and some other small improvements.
IOC 13.1
IOC 13.1 is just released, and is already supported by Scythebill. It's got 43 splits and 12 lumps - to see which affect you, visit the Splits and lumps special report. (This report shows what has changed from one older taxonomy to today's taxonomy - so for just the splits here, you want to look at what's changed since 12.2)
Import improvements
BirdLasser imports should be working again - the column header names changed.
eBird checklist imports will now automatically try to fetch the county for your sighting. It can only do so for hotspots, not private locations.
eBird imports to Scythebill will automatically drop entries like "gull sp." (not supported by Scythebill), and tell you how many such entries were dropped. Scythebill also lets you automatically trim "My Data" eBird imports to just new dates. These two features did not play well together! They do now.
Data entry improvements
After entering a species, earlier versions of Scythebill would let you change a single-species sighting to a "sp." or a hybrid, and let you change "sp." sightings back to single species. You can now make any change among these options - hybrid back to single species, "sp." to hybrid, and hybrid to sp.
Browse by location now supports a Remove sighting... button. (This is actually a bug fix, not a new feature - this button accidentally disappeared a couple of years ago.)
Total ticks improvements
The total ticks report is now much less spartan. Instead of just presenting you with a total number and putting all the details in the spreadsheet, you now get a sorted list of all the locations and their totals, and you can browse species lists (and even edit!).
Extended taxonomy improvements
Extended taxonomies added support for per-country checklists in 15.5.0. This has been enhanced to support per-country status (introduced, escapee, rarity, and extinct). There aren't yet any taxonomies that take advantage of this feature, but I needed to support it in Scythebill first!
Extended taxonomy country checklists also now support Indonesia and Russia.
Other improvements
- The "Reconcile sp.'s automatically..." menu item now lets you - optionally - take advantage of rarity information. For example, a Whimbrel (in the eBird taxonomy) that you saw in California could be a Eurasian Whimbrel (in the IOC taxonomy), but that'd be a rarity. It's much more likely that it was a Hudsonian Whimbrel.
- Scythebill's a bit better at handling backups to Cloud storage - in particular, re-trying automatically (and quietly) when your Cloud storage isn't available at the moment.
- The World Lifers map now honors your countability preferences (so, for instance, if you don't count introduced birds, it won't include those in its count of possible lifers).
- I've added Greek, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Spanish, Albanian, Armenian, Persian, and Marathi as eBird/Clements international names.
- Sri Lanka, Oman, and Russia have updated lists of "states".
- The second IUCN 2022 Redlist updates have been incorporated.
- The Big Day special report summary should now look better on Linux.
- As always, a variety of first country and state records are included in the checklists.
