Scythebill 17.2 - IOC 15.1 taxonomy

Scythebill 17.2.0 is now available.  This release includes the IOC 15.1 taxonomy, and several bug fixes - mostly for eBird imports. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

IOC 15.1 taxonomy

The IOC 15.1 taxonomy was finalized a couple of days ago, and is now available in Scythebill!

Do you like splits, and your life list growing ever larger without leaving the comfort of your armchair?  Well then, this IOC taxonomy release is ... not the one for you.  The world taxonomies are converging on a taxonomy via the Working Group on Avian Checklists, and in this release IOC has un-split a number of splits that IOC offered, but eBird/Clements (and some other taxonomies) had not.

As a result, you're likely to see your IOC life list shrink a bit.  My own dropped by 11 - 13 lumps offset by just 2 splits.

My "Splits and Lumps" report

Bug fixes

There's a variety of bug fixes, mostly centered on eBird imports.

• The last version of Scythebill added support for importing "Download my data" exports straight from the .zip file.  That support didn't work on Macs;  it does now.
• eBird sightings of hybrids should now import successfully.
• eBird checklist .csv files should now import for non-English eBird users.  (I don't know if this is a recent change in eBird or a long-standing feature gap in Scythebill.)
• "New for year" import counts were incorrect when your import spanned multiple years.

Scythebill 17.1 - more spreadsheet options for reports and checklists

Scythebill 17.1.0 is now available.  This release includes some new features for report and checklist spreadsheets, and some . As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

More options for spreadsheets

When saving a report as a spreadsheet, you previously had only one "sort by" option.  It wasn't obvious, but this sorted the species, not the sightings.  If you wanted a list of species in taxonomic order, you couldn't have any sighting other than the earliest.  So if you wanted to generate a report with last-seen dates, there wasn't a great way to do it:

Old spreadsheet options

Now, you can sort both species and sightings, and the dialog has been reorganized:

New spreadsheet options

Checklist spreadsheets have added a similar option. There, the only support was showing your first sighting from the checklist area. So, if you were traveling to Peru for the first time, there wasn't a way to create a checklist that shows where you had seen those species outside of Peru. Now, you can:

New checklist spreadsheet options

There's four options for the sighting - the first sighting (if any) from Peru, the most recent (if any) from Peru, your first sighting anywhere, and the most recent sighting anywhere.

Other changes

• Wildlife Recorder imports now automatically preserve the "Very common", "Common", and "Scarce" approximate numeric counts (-3, -2, and -1 respectively) by copying that text into the sighting notes.
• Tabs in location names are no longer converted to spaces after saving and loading.
• Users who hit the previous bug and were very unlucky could get into a state where their .bsxm files were un-loadable. Scythebill now recovers from this state automatically.