Scythebill 16.3 - easier editing of existing visits

Scythebill 16.3 is now available!  It adds several small improvements and refinements; in particular, it's much easier to edit existing sightings.  There's also a number of new   As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Editing existing sightings

Entering new sightings is easy, but getting back to the "Edit sightings" screen - to edit all the sightings from that visit - has always been a lot more difficult than it should be.  There was one way, buried deep in "Browse by location", but it was hard to find.

Now, it's easy: any time you select a sighting, whether in "Browse by species", "Browse by location", or even "Show reports", you'll see a new Visit sightings... button.  Click that, and you'll be taken to the "Edit sightings" screen with a list of all the sightings from that same visit.

Location checklist spreadsheet improvements

When you save a location checklist as a spreadsheet, there's two new options:

• First, you can turn off including family names, which can make your spreadsheet much shorter.
• Second, you can add a column for whether a species is a lifer.  Previously, the only option was marking the species name in bold, which was hard on those of you who like to write spreadsheet formulas.

BirdLasser import improvements

Scythebill now supports BirdLasser users who use scientific names as something other than the "Tertiary" name.

Scythebill also had a bug that could lead to some species being dropped from BirdLasser imports.  This would only happen in cases where the "ISO Date" column - which has date/time down to the millisecond! - had multiple species with the exact same value.

Small fixes

• In some very odd cases, US states whose two-letter abbreviation matches a country's two-letter abbreviation might display as that country.  (For example, Pennsylvania would appear as Panama!)
• State/province lists are updated for a few countries, to match updated eBird treatment.  The only really significant changes were for France, which changed from 22 regions to 13.  (Scythebill will automatically rearrange your records to match.)

Scythebill 16.2 - small improvements and refinements

Scythebill 16.2 is now available!  It adds several small improvements and refinements.  There's also a number of new   As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 16.2.1 was released with bug fixes and small new features - see below.

Update 2: Scythebill 16.2.2 was released with one bug fix - 16.2.1 broke the "New for" column in Enter sightings for everyone not using multiple observers.

16.2.1: New for an observer

If you've enabled multiple observers, Scythebill will now tell you if that sighting is a lifer for just one of the observers.  You'll still see "World" if it's new for all of the observers, but if it's just new for one or more of them, their abbreviation or abbreviations will appear.

16.2.1: Another way to create trip reports

You can now select multiple "visits" in Browse by location and create a trip report from those visits.

New for "Photographed"

When entering sightings, if a species was photographed for the first time ever in your list, Scythebill will tell you that in the "New for" column.  This is really handy for those of you who care about your list of photographed species. (A fix in 16.2.1: this feature now works if you drop pictures directly onto the camera icon.)

Hybrids and sp's of eBird groups or IOC subspecies

I got pretty annoyed with myself recently when I had an intergrade "Red-shafted"/"Yellow-shafted" Northern Flicker in my backyard - and no way to enter it!  Scythebill now lets you create a sp. or hybrid of these eBird groups or IOC subspecies.

New spreadsheet option - "Omit sp./hybrid sightings?"

When you save a report as a spreadsheet, you now have a new "Omit sp./hybrid sightings?" option.  This will automatically remove any Sp. or hybrid sightings.  This option is particularly useful if you output a spreadsheet sorted by date, which is great for seeing what your 100th species for your patch or 1000th bird for your life list, without having the numbering confused by sp's and hybrids.

Fast access to location maps

You can now click the place-marker icon which shows up for any location with latitude and longitude coordinates, and it'll take you right to Google Maps.  Even better, that icon now shows up in any sighting editing part of Scythebill.  (Let me know if it'd be helpful to add support for other map providers, like OpenStreetMap, Bing, etc.)

Better Wildlife Recorder imports

Wildlife Recorder imports are now much improved.  In particular, if you export a second CSV file with locations, you'll have vastly less work to do on imports.  Also, Scythebill no longer assumes you're using UK-formatted dates

Other fixes

• Some MacOS users with Sonoma (not me!) had reported problems with Save dialogs not showing up when they tried to save reports or country checklists as spreadsheets.  I've made a tweak which might help, though I'll admit the underlying problem is still opaque to me.
• The "Total Ticks" report had problems handling mutli-continent countries, like the US, Indonesia, and Russia.
• A very long-standing bug with an error message "IndexOutOfBoundsException: bitIndex < 0"  is hopefully fixed.
• An error that some users saw when changing observers should be fixed.
• Birder's Diary imports now are more tolerant of files using different encodings. (I think this will fix issues when using the latest version of Birder's Diary, but I also expect that most users will get better results asking Birder's Diary to create a file for eBird, then importing to Scythebill with that.)