Scythebill 18.3.0 is now available. It includes a sneak peek of the AviList taxonomy in "Splits and Lumps" and a bunch of recent bug fixes.
As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
AviList sneak peek
As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I don't plan on moving users to AviList until 2026. But I also promised that I'd add AviList support to the "Splits and Lumps" special report, and that's now available.
Go to "Special reports", then "Splits and lumps". Now, in addition to showing how the current Clements/eBird or IOC compare to past versions of those taxonomies, they also show you how they'll compare to the current version of AviList (AviList 2025).
If you're like me, things seem quite pleasant compared to the latest eBird taxonomy:
 |
| 18 gained, 10 lost - not so bad! |
But IOC is a very different story, with lumps galore:
 |
| 5 gained, 45 lost. Ouch! |
Hopefully, this will prepare for the coming boon/onslaught to your respective lists.
I've also taken measures to ensure that all English names used in AviList are available as alternates for both eBird and IOC taxonomies, which should improve the quality of imports from any tool that uses AviList before Scythebill supports it.
Small features and bug fixes
- There's a new "Excel compatible CSVs?" option in Preferences, which will make Scythebill CSVs load more consistently in Microsoft Excel. (Excel does not support line breaks within CSV columns; it should, but it doesn't.)
- You can now create "Trip reports" in Browse by location when selecting trips.
- Sp. and hybrid resolution could produce error messages when using IOC.
- Observation.org/Observado imports should no longer sometimes mis-allocate sightings to the wrong country for sightings very near the border. They also won't split location names on simple hyphens; Sint-Elooipolder was previously saved as an "Elooipolder" location inside "Sint"!
- Imports that need species resolution now work for files that only have a common name or a scientific name, but not both.
- Multi-year trips (e.g. December-to-January) no longer always have the year range preceding the trip name.
- Browse by location's "Species you haven't seen here" option didn't work if you kept it selected while changing locations.
