Thursday, September 11, 2025

Scythebill 18.4.2 - easy location merging, family lifer maps, and bug fixes

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.

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!

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment