Scythebill 18.4.2 is now available. I'm mostly releasing it now to get out some bug fixes, but it also has some new features - location merging is much easier, and there's a new "World family lifers map" in Special reports.
As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
Update: Scythebill 18.4.3 was released on October 6, with a few important fixes to location editing. It also adds some new options for sighting notes reports, described below.
Update 2: Scythebill 18.4.4 was released on October 13. It should fix trip report generation on Windows, and also includes the latest IUCN Redlist updates.
Easy location merging
Scythebill has a rule that any one "parent" location can't have duplicate names among its immediate "children" locations. This meant that if you were reorganizing your locations in Browse by location, you might have seen this annoying dialog, asking you to go read the manual to find a multi-step process:
Now, you'll see this dialog:
Just click "OK" and the two locations are merged. It works whether you're dragging-and-dropping, or editing the name directly, or using the "Edit..." dialog. It'll even merge multiple locations all at once if you drag multiple locations onto a new parent.
World family lifers map
If you're interested in seeing all the families of birds in the world (or all the families of mammals, or any other world taxonomy supported by Scythebill), you can now get a fast overview of what countries to visit. Just select Special reports, then click on World family lifers map. Here's what it looks like for a new user without any sightings (so, effectively, showing you how many families of birds each country has in total):
Not a world-changing feature, I'll be the first to admit, but it shows some fun facts. Indonesia has the most families of birds anywhere - 125. And what country in the Americas has the most families? Not Colombia or Brazil, which are incredibly species-rich; it's Mexico, with 96!
New options for "Sighting notes" report options (18.4.3)
If you use eBird, you may have run into the issue that it doesn't have any way to indicate that a bird was heard-only. Many users have adopted one convention or another in the sighting notes - like using "H" or "(H)" or "Heard" - to indicate heard-only species. You can now use "Sighting notes" queries to find these more easily - and then use "Bulk edit..." to set heard-only in Scythebill. There's four new options - two each standard and case-sensitive - for "is exactly" and "starts with word". "Is exactly" does what it says - you could use it to find everything where the notes are exactly the letter "H". While "Starts with word" lets you find notes that start with "H" - but only as a word, not just a letter. So "H - a long way off" would match, but "Happy discovery" would not.
Bug fixes
There's a number of bug fixes - almost all of which were reported by users to whom I am exceedingly grateful.
- The Western Palearctic region only included the Asian portion of Egypt.
- Deleting a location used for a Trip could result in a broken .bsxm file!
- Generating a checklist spreadsheet for a non-bird taxonomy and multiple Australian states could fail.
- The "first anywhere" and "most recent anywhere" sighting options for checklist spreadsheets failed if you selected multiple locations.
- Some features of Scythebill rely on opening web pages in browsers (especially clicking on map links); these weren't working for some Linux users, and (hopefully) will now.
- 18.4.3: editing a location name immediately after a merge could cause corrupted locations.
- 18.4.3: using the Edit... dialog to edit a location type (but leaving the name constant) could cause corrupted locations.
