Scythebill 18.2.0 - Browse by trips improvements, privacy preferences, and more

Scythebill 18.2.0 is now available.  It includes a number of new features, most notably improvements to "Browse by trips" and new privacy options in Preferences.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Browse by trips improvements

The recently added "Browse by trips" page now has several new options at the top of the screen:

Lots of new features!

For starters, every time you select a trip (or multiple trips), you'll immediately see how many lifers you got on that trip. You can also enable "Highlight lifers?" to clearly show you those lifers.

It's also much easier to find trips - you can enter the name of a trip (in typical choose-your-own-abbreviation Scythebill fashion) in a new field at the upper left, then click "Jump to" to immediately select it.

And once you've picked a trip, you can find a species fast with a separate species name and "Jump to" button - here at the upper right.

Privacy preferences

The preferences page now has three new options:

By default, Scythebill will use Google Maps and eBird hotspot APIs to help compute latitudes and longitudes, or to find locations near latitude/longitude pairs. These requests do not and have never sent any cookies to those APIs, but if you're uncomfortable with those requests being sent to Google and eBird, you can now disable them.

Scythebill also defaults to using Google Maps to display maps around locations, and when you click a site icon next to a location name with latitude/longitude, it'll open a web browser with Google Maps.  If you're uncomfortable with that choice, you can now switch to OpenStreetMap, or disable maps altogether.

Scythebill also now includes a concise privacy policy in its Help menu, outlining what Scythebill does, or rather doesn't do with your data. I don't expect any surprises lurking in the text, but please let me know if you have any concerns whatsoever.

Other improvements

When you enter a location name, Scythebill will now prefer recently and commonly used location names, so Scythebill will give you local patches before some site you visited once in 1995!

You can also now enter "magic" location names, like the ABA region and Western Palearctic, in the "Jump to" option in Browse by location. Entering these will automatically select all the constitutent locations.  So, for example, "ABA region" will select Canada, the (continental) US, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Hawaii, and give you the combined checklist.

Finally, the disk image files on MacOS now have a more useful appearance, making it clearer and easier to copy Scythebill into your Applications folder:

Bug fixes

• The "Enter sightings" table had a variety of visual oddities that cropped up with the interface refresh in 18.1.0.  It should now look more consistent and readable in both light and dark modes.
• When entering sightings, the Cancel button would not give you any warnings of lost work if you cancelled before you had entered any species. That could be quite annoying if you'd entered a long visit or trip description!  It now warns you much sooner.
• An odd and long-standing bug where a day-less date like "March 2003" was not considered after "February 14 2002" has been fixed.
• The "Jump to" species button in "Show reports" didn't work to jump to subspecies or groups, and now does.
• The AOS North region checklist omitted Cuba and The Bahamas;  this didn't affect your species list for this region, but it meant that (for example) reports would claim there are only 4 species of Tody, not 5.