Scythebill 18.0.0 is now available, with a couple of big new features!
For all users, Scythebill now supports the notion of trips - recording sightings for a trip that lasted more than just a single day. You can also organize old visits into trips - and Scythebill can automate that for work for you too.
And for Wildlife Recorder users, you can now import into Scythebill right from Wildlife Recorder's own .mdb files. No need to run painstaking separate exports for each country - you can import an entire taxonomy's records in one go, right from Scythebill, without even opening Wildlife Recorder!
The trip feature required a lot of changes in the guts of Scythebill, so I'm more worried about bugs than I am in a typical release. I'd call this a "beta" release of Scythebill. If you're not specifically interested in either of these features, you might hold off on this release for a bit.
As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
Update: Scythebill 18.0.1 and 18.0.2 each added a few quality improvements to 18.0.0. See notes about those releases at the end.
Trips!
Scythebill has long let users enter sightings with vague dates - "December 2015", or just "2010". But there wasn't a way to record sightings for a trip that was a bit precise, but not a single date - say, "November 11-15, 2017". This was particularly awkward for users importing data from birding software that leaned heavily on this (like Wildlife Recorder).
Now, Scythebill can store sightings attached to a "Trip" - a location with a start date and an end date. There's a new "Browse by trips" page in Scythebill that lets you see all of your sightings by trip:
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| The new Browse by trips page. |
This page lets you view trips, delete them, merge them, and create trip reports using all the sightings and the new "Trip notes" feature. And it's got a handy button - Automatically create trips... - which can quickly gather all of your existing sightings in Scythebill into a list of trips.
You can also see your trips in Browse by location, and enter new sightings as trips.
You can also mix and match using visits and trips if you want. This way, you can enter yet another trip with Rock Pigeon and House Sparrow without carefully tracking the location, while keeping exact dates and places - as visits - for more special species. If the visits you enter fall within the date range you've given, those sightings will automatically be included in the trip.
I'm hoping to add more features over time to Trips. If you've got ideas, let me know!
Wildlife Recorder one-step imports
After decades of support for the birding community, Wildlife Recorder is no longer being supported. Scythebill has long offered support for importing from Wildlife Recorder, but it's been lacking in some ways (none of the trip data was supported by Scythebill), and it required repeated per-country exports from Wildlife Recorder, followed by repeated per-country imports into Scythebill. This was all a bit fiddly.
Now, it's one step in Scythebill, and zero steps in Wildlife Recorder: Scythebill can import directly off of the .mdb files that Wildlife Recorder used for its storage. You don't need to be on Windows, or even have access to the Wildlife Recorder software. If you've got a backup of the Wildlife Recorder data, that'll work too - the .mdb files are right there in the backup's .zip file.
And Scythebill imports more data than it used to - trip data and observer names, for instance - and does a much better job of creating locations only when needed. It'll even automatically use either the IOC or eBird/Clements taxonomy data from inside Wildlife Recorder depending on which taxonomy you have selected in Scythebill/
If you use non-bird taxonomies in Wildlife Recorder, each of those has its own .mdb file, so you will need to do one import per taxonomy. But you can keep all of your data across all taxonomies in a single Scythebill file!
If you try this and find any data missing that you expected, please let me know. I've had to reverse-engineer how Wildlife Recorder stored its data from a couple of examples, but in particular didn't have any examples of sighting "pinpoints" or media usage.
Other changes and fixes
- The front page of Scythebill has been updated a bit to include the new "Browse by trip" button, as well as putting "Manage taxonomies" up front.
- Canadian users had issues importing eBird checklist files. This is fixed.
- Scythebill should do a better job of getting imported sightings to the "right" location for how Scythebill organizes sightings (e.g., Papua being imported to Australasian Indonesia, the Galapagos Islands being imported there instead of as a state of mainland Ecuador, etc.).
- Scythebill's also better at supporting alternate country names (St Lucia instead of Saint Lucia, for example).
- Imports with subspecies data are handled better when there are differences between the current taxonomy in Scythebill and the taxonomy of the original software.
- 18.0.1: Wildlife Recorder .mdb file imports were broken on MacOS; they now work there as well.
- 18.0.1: You can edit sightings inside Browse by trips.
- 18.0.1: When editing trip info, there's a Trip sightings... button to take you straight into "Enter sightings" for the trip.
- 18.0.1: For Browse by trips, if a species has just one sighting, you no longer get a bunch of screen space taken up by a list with that one sighting - rather, you're taken straight into a sighting editing panel. This should save a click in many circumstances.
- 18.0.1: The installer now works on Fedora Linux
- 18.0.2: Browse by trips now has a chooser to select between showing species only, eBird/Clements groups, or subspecies.
- 18.0.2: A number of issues with cutting and pasting sightings in Browse by location have been fixed.
- 18.0.2: An error seen by multiple users when changing reporting options in Show reports has been fixed.
- 18.0.2: Trip reports have mildly tweaked formatting, leaning more on tabs and using a few less new lines.
- 18.0.2: Trip reports generated from Show reports now have trip informatio
