Scythebill 20.0 - a big release!

Scythebill 20.0 is now available. It's got ... a lot!

• The front pages of Scythebill have been redesigned, including...
• The "Remembered reports" feature can now be reordered, and names can be edited
• The "Lifers map" is now a dynamic, in-app map
• There's a new "Ticks map" in "Special reports", also a dynamic, in-app map, supporting states in nearly all countries and even US and UK counties!
• "Manage Taxonomies" can automatically download and install or upgrade world taxonomies in bulk.
• ... and more.

I'll publish posts that give more details about these new features - but today, I'll just talk about the new front page and a few smaller things.

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

Update: Scythebill 20.0.3 was released on July 13th to fix a large performance problem on "Enter sightings".

Update 2: Scythebill 20.0.4 was released on July 15th to fix an error on "Enter sightings" for the first sightings on a new location; it includes some other small changes (noted below).

New front page design

Scythebill's main pages have long been rather plain. I could insist that was an intentional design choice, but that isn't really true - I'd just never put in the time to improve it. I think the new design is a substantial improvement - without going too far:

 

But it's not just a visual change. The "Remembered reports" section at the top is much more flexible. You can drag to reorder items within the list, and when you move the mouse over an entry you'll see a pencil icon - click that, and you can (at long last) edit the name of a remembered report!

And what's more, "Remembered reports" now connects to "New for" messages across Scythebill! Because I've saved "ABA region" above, and ordered it near the top, Scythebill will automatically tell me when a new sighting is new for the ABA region in "Enter sightings" or in the post-import summary, and if I create a checklist spreadsheet for a US state or Canadian province, it'll tell me if a species would be new for my ABA list.

Safer .bsxm file management

A number of users over the years have gotten confused by having multiple .bsxm files. As a reminder: Scythebill saves all of your data in a single .bsxm file. Backups are great, but if you accidentally open a backup .bsxm file and start adding sightings to that backup, your main copy doesn't get the new sightings!

Scythebill now automatically catches these conditions, warns you, and offers to re-open the newest file instead:

But that's not all!  Before, if you renamed or moved your .bsxm file, or had it stored an external drive that wasn't available, Scythebill would dump you at the new user screen without any guidance why it happened. Now, that screen will tell you why you're here and where the .bsxm file had been (and this new user screen is also redesigned)!

  

Easier World Taxonomy management

The Manage Taxonomies page has also been updated. But most importantly, there's a new button at the top - "Download world taxonomies...". But look closely at that screenshot - there's an "Updates available" message! Scythebill now automatically detects when updates are available to the five most-used world taxonomies.

Click that button, and a dialog appears. On my list, it shows that I'm fully up-to-date with Mammals, but I could update Butterflies, Reptiles, and Odonates, and never installed Amphibians.

Click "Download and install", and Scythebill will do the rest!

But it gets better: previously, if an upgrade had some taxonomic issues it couldn't automatically handle, Scythebill would write a .csv file to disk containing everything it couldn't handle, and ask you to remember to use "Import sightings" later. Now, Scythebill will direct you straight to the import flow without any extra files.

And more...

Some of these additions are big enough that I'll talk about them in another blog post, but I like to provide a full list of changes with each release, so:

Special reports

• The lifers map and "total ticks" special reports have been massively overhauled and improved
• "Verify against checklists..." and "Find checklist rarities..." are no longer in the File menu, but are condensed into a new "Checklist status report" that shows inside Scythebill. As a small improvement, it lets you also see species which are marked as a variety of others checklist statuses - Extinct, Endemic, Introduced, and Not established.
• The "Splits and Lumps" report now shows if you lost any species from a split because of an unresolved "sp.".
• 20.0.4: the Splits and Lumps report now gives a graceful message when you switch to a non-bird taxonomy
• 20.0.4: the Ticks Map now always uses the eBird names for states

Preferences

• The Preferences page has been redesigned and separated into multiple tabs
• The Backup page can now - with one click - point your backups at one of several cloud providers (DropBox, Google Drive, Apple's iCloud, and Microsoft's OneDrive)

Other

• The Western Palearctic "magic location" now automatically incorporates latitude and longitude to rule in and out sightings in all the countries where the border does not fall along exact state lines. The boundary in Kazkahstan is still not right - it should follow the Ural river, but currently uses a line of longitude as a poor approximation.
• The Spanish and German translations are massively improved.
• The Scythebill CSV format now correctly preserves manually entered photo names and "starred" favorites.
• Imports which purely pass latitude/longitude now typically resolve not just to country, but also to state and sometimes (in the US and the UK) even county.
• BirdBrain imports were completely failing if any sighting had a non-country location (like deepwater pelagics)
• New users are automatically given a "Download taxonomies" dialog to add any of the 5 world taxonomies.
• 20.0.4: eBird updates to the list of states for Vietnam, Tanzania, the Seychelles, and South Korea have been incorporated
• 20.0.5: an error introduced by the previous update made some .bsxm files with records from South Korea or Vietnam unloadable.