Scythebill 16.6 is now available! It's got the IOC 14.2 taxonomy, checklist printing, Birda imports, and a native Apple Silicon version. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
October 6 update: Scythebill 16.6.1 includes a couple of new features and several bug fixes.
IOC 14.2 taxonomy
The headline feature is the latest IOC taxonomy - 14.2, released earlier this month. It's a huge revision, with splits ranging the familiar (Red Grouse from Willow Ptarmigan) to the obscure (Vella Lavella Monarch from Kolombangara Monarch), to the big (a 7-way split of House Wren) and the absurdly big (a 17-way split of Island Thrush). And there's some lumps as well - for those of us who've spent time in the Palearctic, all the Redpolls are lumped. You can see the full list of taxonomic changes on the IOC site.
As always, Scythebill will handle much of the work for you automatically. Once you're done, visit the Splits and Lumps report under Special Reports, and see what changed for your list:
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| Changes to my list in 14.2 |
(Scythebill 16.6.1 fixes a slightly incorrect mapping for the three-way Rock Martin split.)
Checklist printing
There's a new option when viewing a location checklist in Browse by location: Print...
This gives you a way to print out a checklist without carefully formatting a spreadsheet, including a compact form which takes up very little space.
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| A compact checklist for Grenada |
(Scythebill 16.6.1 fixes an error that affected some printed checklists for locations you'd already visited.)Native support for Apple Silicon (16.6.1)
For the last several years, Apple has released Macs using their own CPUs, starting with the M1 (then M2, M3, and M4 today), collectively called "Apple silicon". Scythebill runs fine on these, but only by built-in emulation software called Rosetta. Rosetta's free and installed on-demand, but relying on it means software runs more slowly and uses more memory than if it ran natively.
With 16.6.1, Scythebill now offers a native Apple silicon download. In my informal tests, this version starts up twice us fast as the previous version. If you're using an old Mac, no worries - I'll continue releasing Scythebill to support older CPUs.
Birda imports (16.6.1)
Birda is a relatively recent site supporting in-the-field bird sighting entry. Scythebill now supports importing Birda exports. Even if you don't use Scythebill, this could be used to move data from Birda to eBird -Birda exports require a lot of work to transform into a form acceptable by eBird, and Scythebill will handle that for you.
Small features and fixes
There's a new preference "Show extinct taxa?". It's enabled by default, but you can turn it off if you'd rather not see extinct species and subspecies in Scythebill. (If you've been fortunate enough to see a species that is now extinct, it will still be shown.)
Observado imports should more consistently include latitude and longitude. (At least some countries used "lon" as an abbreviation for longitude instead of "lng".)
As a very minor tweak: if you sort report spreadsheets by date, and there are multiple observations with that same date, those observations will be sorted in taxonomic order.
