Editing everywhere, IOC 3.4, new installers, and more: Scythebill 9.2.1 is available

Well, phew.  It's been a couple of months since the last release.  They've been busy months, and there's lots of improvements.


Get it here (it's a new download page, with better instructions).

New installers

If you're a Windows or Linux users, the first thing you'll notice is a new installer, courtesy of Bitrock Installbuilder (thanks for their free support of open source software).  If you're a Windows user, you get:

• No need to install Java.
• .bsxm files (where sightings are stored) now have an icon, and you can double-click them to start up Scythebill

This product is new to me, so the old standalone .exe is still available for download if the installer doesn't work, but I recommend using the installer if possible.

The Linux installer doesn't do as much, but should still make it easier to get started.  (Linux users will still need a separate installation of Java.)

For MacOS users, there's no installer (they're just not that necessary on MacOS), but the application is finally signed  - so Mountain Lion users shouldn't see "Scythebill is damaged and can't be opened" ever again.  There's a nice explanation of Mountain Lion and it's Gatekeeper feature here.

A picture of a Scythebill!

Once installed, you might notice is that Scythebill now has a new icon and splash screen!  It's of an actual Red-billed Scythebill, and is far higher quality than that old Yellow Cardinal shot of mine.  The MacOS and Windows icons now also scale much better.  Thanks and credit go to Alan Smith for the donation.

IOC 3.4 - just released, already supported

The IOC 3.4 list update was released yesterday morning, and is already supported in Scythebill.

A lot more ways to edit

I've gotten consistent feedback from users that it's hard to edit existing sightings in Scythebill.  It got quite a bit better in 9.2.0, and is even better in 9.2.1.

Most notably, you can now edit right from "Show reports".  Issue any report you want, select a sighting, and you can edit that sighting.  Or, even better:  you can generate a report, and click the new "Bulk edit..." button, which will let you edit all matched sightings at once!  If you accidentally entered 500 sightings in Peru for 2003 when it should have been 2004, just:

1. Go to Show reports.
2. Search for <Location> <is in> Peru (and if you need to limit it to just one trip, add <Date> <is During> 2003)
3. Click Bulk Edit... at the bottom
4. Change 2003 to 2004.
5. Click "OK".

(Thanks to user dfoxmi for the inspiration.)

You can also edit dates (one-by-one, or in bulk) everywhere.

New data fields and report generation options

Two data fields have been added.

First, you can set an "Adult" checkbox for sightings that aren't specifically male or female, but are definitely not immatures.

More interestingly - and hopefully in time for a few sightings this summer - is the addition of Breeding Bird Codes.  Scythebill supports the full set of eBird breeding bird codes, and you can issue reports against breeding bird categories (e.g. "Confirmed" breeding).

Also, you can now issue reports against the Description field - if you're trying to find that raptor sighting where a Red-shouldered Blackbird was dive-bombing it, it's now much easier to track it down quickly.

Smaller features

There's also a new View menu to change font sizes, so if you've got a huge monitor you can expand the font size to be easier on the eyes.  And if you've got a small monitor, you can shrink the font size down.  (Large fonts and small monitors may not work well together.) Thanks to user "chkmypc" for the idea.

There's some smaller things too:

• You can now enter Italian Sparrow on the IOC list (should've been able to even in IOC 3.3).  Thanks to Peter W. for the report.
• eBird import now supports importing single-day checklists.  Thanks to user "righttoreason" for the report.
• Drag-and-drop of locations in "Browse by locations" (for re-arranging) now works better.  When you hover over a collapsed location, it'll automatically expand.  And you properly get feedback on MacOS as you drag over other items.
• Total sighting counts in HTML reports and printouts were missing "sp." sightings.
• Scythebill fonts won't be fuzzy on MacOS displays that are "Retina" capable.

Thanks! 

As always, if you have any issues with Scythebill, please let me know, either by email or on the issue tracker.  Cheers!

Scythebill 9.2.0 - better editing and (some big) bug fixes

Scythebill 9.2.0 is now available!

It's available a bit earlier than I intended (and so with a few less features), but it includes a fix for a fairly unpleasant bug.  If you entered sightings with the IOC taxonomy, additional sighting details (comments, heard-only, etc.) were dropped - only the species, location, and date were getting saved.  (The bug didn't affect data entry with Clements.)  Thanks enormously to Kev for the bug report!

That fix aside, Scythebill 9.2.0 includes a bunch of new features, mostly around improved editing support.

Full IOC subspecies support (almost)

Prior versions of Scythebill did not let you enter IOC subspecies where there was no corresponding Clements subspecies - this affected somewhere over 1000 IOC subspecies!  You can now enter almost all of these - there's about a dozen or so that are not yet supported.

Bulk editing

In both "Browse by species" and "Browse by location", you can select a slew of sightings (of a single species) and edit fields en masse.  This is especially handy, for example, in setting "Introduced" status correctly - for the "NIB" listers (No Introduced Birds) among us.

Browse by location improvements

• You can now enter new locations right from Browse by location.  Select the existing location where you want to add a sub-location first, and click "New..." at the bottom
• You can select multiple locations and drag-and-drop them onto another location (for example, if you entered several locations as directly in the United Kingdom, and wanted to move them into England, inside the UK).
• You can now use the Cut/Copy/Paste menu items to move sightings to an alternate location. (Before, you could only drag-and-drop)

Easier "Sp." resolution

You can now select "Sp." sightings in "Browse by species" and "Browse by location" and resolve them to a single taxon (one at a time, or en masse).  This is especially handy if you're switching between Clements and IOC - is that Osprey you entered in Clements an IOC Western Osprey or Eastern Osprey?

Smaller fixes

• Selection was sometimes incorrect after pasting sightings.  Most of these problems have been resolved.
• While entering sightings, changing the subspecies by the keyboard would move the keyboard focus onto the Cancel button... and selecting Cancel would drop all your sightings without any warning!  Both halves are fixed - focus moves to the table, and clicking Cancel will always warn you that sightings will be lost.
• Some small UI glitches displaying and editing "sp." sightings have been fixed.
• A few alternate names now say "- in part" (for example "Capped Seedeater", which was split to Copper Seedeater and Pearly-bellied Seedeater).  More will come in the future.

As always, if you have any issues with Scythebill, please let me know, either by email or on the issue tracker.  Cheers!

Scythebill 9.1.0 - imports and alternate names

Scythebill 9.1.0 is now available.

There's two major new features - but perhaps more important are some significant bug fixes.  On Windows and Linux, the Cut/Copy/Paste menu items have been quite broken - they've always appeared as disabled.  (The Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V shortcuts have always worked, but it was hard to know.)  This should be resolved.  If you're still having any problems, please let me know.   Thanks to Elena V. for the bug report!

Now, for the fun stuff...

Scythebill has long been missing any way to import data - I've done some one-offs for those bold enough to ask (and thank you to those who did!).  Now, at last, there's an Import menu option (in the File menu).  Scythebill 9.1.0 can import from the following formats:

• Avisys CSV export
• eBird CSV export
• Scythebill's own CSV export

I'd like to add more, but I need samples!  If you have any examples of different formats, please let me know.

Also, Scythebill now has a wealth of alternate names - over 7400 alternate common names, and a couple of hundred alternate scientific names - that you can use while entering species in either IOC or Clements.  So if you know Gavia immer as Great Northern Diver, go ahead and type "grnd" or whatever abbreviation you want - Scythebill will find it.  It'll still show up on your list as the IOC - Great Northern Loon - or Clements - Common Loon - name, though - this just makes it much easier to enter your sightings or browse the species list.

Smaller fixes and changes:

• The MacOS version failed to start altogether if it was in a directory or drive containing a space!  Ugh.  (This also meant that Scythebill would not start if it was launched from the downloaded disk image, and has been broken since 9.0.2.)
• The Export... option now includes Index and City columns, and a glitch with backslash characters in descriptions has been fixed.
• Pasting text into fields was generally broken.
• Some additional corrections have been made to the Clements taxonomy, all reassigning subspecies to more closely adhere to IOC - all appears to be errors by Cornell.

As always, if you have any issues with Scythebill, please let me know, either by email or on the issue tracker.  Cheers!

IOC 3.3 upgrade now available

Version 3.3 of the IOC taxonomy was released on January 28th, 2013.

On January 29th, 2013, Scythebill 9.0.4 was released, including IOC 3.3.  (Sadly, it was released 30 minutes too late to qualify as a "same day" upgrade, at least in Pacific Standard Time.)  No other changes this time around.

Enjoy!

Scythebill 9.0.3 released!

Scythebill 9.0.3 is now available!

If you're coming to Scythebill 9 from 0.8.6, there's two new big features.

First, Scythebill supports entering "sp." sightings and hybrids.   So, finally there's some way to record that Eurasian x Short-toed Treecreeper you couldn't quite identify, or that Western x Glaucous-winged Gull that no one should ever identify (to just one species).

More interestingly, Scythebill now supports the International Ornithologists’ Union checklist (version 3.2), hereafter known as the "IOC list".  You can enter, or display, or generate reports with either checklist, and it's just a quick flip of the taxonomy chooser at the top of the window to do so.  (EBird exports are always generated with the Clements taxonomy, so you can now use the IOC list to keep your own sightings, but still export to EBird.)

To make this mapping a bit simpler, I've corrected a variety of (seeming) errors in the Clements checklist.

There's also a number of smaller features, like:

• An "Export..." menu option to get all your data out of Scythebill into one flat file.
• "Report an issue" and "Open containing" folder menu items
• "Town" and "park" location types
• Fixes for window sizing on Windows operating systems
• A number of performance improvements

If you're coming to this version from an earlier beta, this adds (relative to 9.0.2):

• A new "Export..." menu option that fully exports all your sightings into a flat file, all data preserved. (Do let me know if the format here suffices, especially for import into other software.)
• A number of fixes to the mapping to the IOC taxonomy - about 30+ splits properly identified, and 70 odd renamed subspecies that had not been addressed before.
• An "Open containing window" menu option that will get you to the folder where your Scythebill data is stored, in case you've forgotten.
• Species entry by scientific name was broken in an earlier revision;  it's now working again.

Scythebill 9.0.2 released (beta)

Scythebill 9.0.2 is now available for download!  This version - still a beta of Scythebill 9 - includes some fixes and refinements to the IOC support made available in Scythebill 9.0.1.

The most important fix should make Windows users much happier, especially those with small displays.  Scythebill could size itself so that the bottom of its windows were hidden by the Windows taskbar, making some windows difficult-to-impossible to use.

Some of the small features added in this release:

• Locations can now be classified as "towns" or "parks".
• In Show Reports, you can get a list of just "sp."s or "hybrids".  This is especially useful when adapting to the IOC list (as this make it easier to find, say, that your Clements Ospreys are IOC Eastern/Western Osprey).
• Added a "Report an issue..." link to the Help menu.

For a full list of changes, see the Change log.

IOC 3.2 support now available (beta)!

Scythebill 9.0.1 is now available for download!  This version - please think of it as a beta - includes two major new features.

First, Scythebill supports entering "sp." sightings and hybrids.   So, finally there's some way to record that Eurasian x Short-toed Treecreeper you couldn't quite identify, or that Western x Glaucous-winged Gull that no one should ever identify (to just one species).

More interestingly, Scythebill now supports the International Ornithologists’ Union checklist (version 3.2), hereafter known as the "IOC list".  You can enter, or display, or generate reports with either checklist, and it's just a quick flip of the taxonomy chooser at the top of the window to do so.  (EBird exports are always generated with the Clements taxonomy, so you can now use the IOC list to keep your own sightings, but still export to EBird.)

More details on both features to come.  For now, please do use the comment area to let me know if you see any problems with either feature, and especially if you find any problems with IOC list entry.  There are some known issues:

• I've made some modifications to the Clements list to make alignment far simpler.  In (nearly) all such cases, I'm quite confident the modifications correct errors in Clements, but feedback is highly appreciated!
• There are quite a few subspecies in the IOC list that are not included in Clements (and a handful of newly described species).  In all these cases, you can't enter those subspecies;  if you open "Browse by species" and wander around, you'll see such subspecies struck through like this.  Supporting those subspecies would be quite nasty, so there's no immediate plans to fix this.  I suspect, though, that some of these are just renamed subspecies (which I'll happily fix).
• In general, flipping back and forth between the two taxonomies works really well.  But there's some issues with this process when entering sightings - sometimes flipping from Clements to IOC and back to Clements doesn't give you quite what you started with (generally, a "sp." comes out the other end.)

And if you're wondering:  yes, the version jumped from 0.8.7 to 9.0.1.   That's intentional.  I think the old versioning scheme made Scythebill look less ready-for-prime-time than was deserved.