Scythebill 13.9.4 - small bug fixes

Scythebill 13.9.4 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.  This version includes a number of small bug fixes, including one that will become important in a month!

Bugs fixed

• Google has changed its policies around Maps and Geolocation APIs - and as a result, as of June 11th, earlier versions of Scythebill will stop displaying location maps or being able to use Google to "geolocate" (find latitude/longitude given a location or vice versa).
• The "New Location" dialog would have the OK and Cancel buttons hidden off the bottom for users that chose the largest font size.
• Scythebill now gives a useful warning message if you move or delete a ".bsxm" file, instead of just surprising you with the "New/Open" screen.
• Scythebill will (I hope) no longer show an odd error message in some rare cases when typing species names (perhaps, in particular, in extended taxonomies?).

Scythebill 13.9.3 - small changes and fixes

Scythebill 13.9.3 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.  This version includes a number of small improvements and bug fixes requested by users.

Faster checklist data entry

In non-checklist species entry, you've long been able to type numbers right into the species selection field, and Scythebill would jump you straight into the "count" field for the current species;  and from there you can type letters like "h", "i", "m", and "f" to flip some of the sighting flags;  and then Return jumps you write back to species entry.  Handy!  But not very helpful for checklist entry.  Now it works there too!  You don't even have to tap the space bar to enter a species - just start typing the number of individuals you saw, and it'll add the species to your list, and start entering the number!

Small improvements

• Scythebill has upgraded to the 2017 IUCN Red List - a list of species conservation status, from Least Concern down to Critically Endangered and Extinct.  The news isn't all bad ... but it's mostly not good.
• In Show reports and Browse by location, genera are now only abbreviated after the first time they're shown (so Rhea americana and R. pennata, not R. americana and R. pennata).
• In Browse by species, sightings are now ordered starting with the most recent sightings, with the oldest at the bottom.  (Everything else always behaved that way;  this is a long-standing inconsistency.)
• As always, this version has a number of smaller range corrections and first-country records.

Bugs fixed

• On MacOS, dragging photos into Scythebill was broken.  This should now work.
• BirdLasser imports started behaving very oddly in Scythebill 13.9.1 if you hadn't set an explicit name for each location you entered in BirdLasser.  This should be fixed.
• Clicking "Add species" in Browse by location in Species you haven't seen here mode showed error dialogs and otherwise behaved oddly.  It should now work.
• In the Show reports screen, the "Print..." and "Export to a spreadsheet" options now treat "Show threatened status" consistently - anything Vulnerable or worse (so not Least Concern or Near Threatened).

Scythebill 13.9.1 - IOC 8.1, Wildlife Recorder imports, and more

Scythebill 13.9.1 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.  This version includes the brand-new IOC 8.1 taxonomy, support for importing from Wildlife Recorder, and a bunch of smaller changes.


Update: Scythebill 13.9.2 is out, largely to fix glitches in Wildlife Recorder imports.  There's also now an "and save..." checkbox when entering sightings, enabled by default, which will save altogether as soon as you click "Done".

IOC 8.1

The IOC 8.1 checklist is now available, and you can update to it just by installing the latest version of Scythebill.  This time around, there's 6 splits from around the world, as well as a couple of lumps.

There's also a couple of subspecies which have moved from one species to another - in particular, the Indochinese subspecies "viridis" has moved from Black-backed Swamphen to Grey-headed Swamphen, which might affect your list.

Wildlife Recorder imports

Scythebill now supports importing Wildlife Recorder "trip" exports.  Please export with headers and coordinates enabled.  This is a beta version - please do let me know if you run into any problems.

Better imports

"Scythebill"-format imports are now a lot more flexible in handling the date column.   I still recommend "yyyy-MM-dd" formats (like 2018-01-27), but most date formats should import cleanly.  Let me know if you hit upon one that doesn't!

Imports from eBird checklists (and Wildlife Recorder imports) should be even less work, as Scythebill now takes advantage of latitude/longitude from existing sightings and eBird's database of birding locales.  (And this should continue to get better in the future.)

Smaller features

Scythebill now supports "Big Months" in addition to "Big Days" and "Big Years".

Scythebill now comes with "United States (Pacific Ocean)" and "United States (West Indies)" checklists.

The "Heard only" indicator - (H) - on sightings in "Browse by species" now comes right after the date, instead of after the date and location.  (It was often scrolled off the screen altogether

You can now generate reports by exact breeding codes (like "Nest Building"), not just categories like "Probable".  There's also a couple of new breeding codes from eBird - "Multiple (7+) singing males" and "Singing Male Present 7+ Days", both of which are considered "Probable" breeding.  You can read the full list of breeding codes and their descriptions on the eBird site.

The "Visits" header inside "Browse by location" now shows the total number of visits to a site (e.g., "Visits (83)").

Bug fixes

In some unusual circumstances, data entry could drop single-digit species counts.

Scythebill 13.9 - ABA region updates and bug fixes

Scythebill 13.9 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.  This version updates the definition of the ABA region - most notably, now including Hawaii, and includes some other fixes.

ABA Region improvements

As of the ABA Checklist Version 8.0, Hawaii (including the Northwestern Islands, like Midway) is now part of the ABA Region.  Scythebill now adopts that treatment.

If you want to keep track of the old definition, Scythebill has added a reporting region called "ABA region (without Hawaii)".

Related to ABA listing, though not the ABA region itself: the Azores and Madeira are now included in Europe, after confirming this treatment with the ABA listing committee.

Small changes

• The Scythebill installer will now add desktop shortcuts on Windows and Linux.
• Banggai and Taliabu Leaf Warblers - two undescribed taxa from Indonesia - are now supported.
• The preferences for IOC and eBird/Clements common names previously included an  "English (UK)" option which confused multiple users.  It makes Scythebill use BOU names where applicable, names like "Wren" and "Swallow".  It's been renamed to "English (BOU)" to make clear its intent.

As always, there's lots of small checklist improvements reflecting both corrections and recent new records.

Bug fixes

• The "Verify against checklists..." feature would incorrectly report some species as not found in the United Kingdom (e.g. Black-bellied/Grey Plover).
• If you accidentally dragged some built-in locations (e.g. "Orange County") out of their parent, and wanted to move it back to its original location, Scythebill would give an error message.  This is fixed.
• One user reported that on Windows 10, trying to import a checklist was now crashing Scythebill!  This should be resolved, though it apparently was not happening to most users.
• Fixed an error ("Comparison method violates...") that could happen in "Browse by species" in some unusual cases.
• Fixed an error triggered when editing a custom checklist and then switching between IOC and eBird/Clements.
• Exporting eBird checklists for Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas would potentially not handle those regions' "states" correctly.
• The built-in checklist for the Åland Islands was not loading.

Scythebill 13.8 - the 2017 eBird/Clements taxonomy is available!

Scythebill 13.8 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.    This version includes the recently released 2017 update to the eBird/Clements taxonomy and a number of bug fixes.  Thank you to all of the users who reported these bugs!  Your help in keeping Scythebill reliable is invaluable.

eBird/Clements 2017 Taxonomy

The 2017 update is now available and supported in Scythebill.  

See eBird's page on the update for an excellent summary of the species level changes, and Cornell's page, with details on all the 11(!!) new families and many species and subspecies changes.  For North American birders, these reflect the recent American Ornithology Society (AOS, formerly AOU) changes.

As always, the update will be largely automatic.  There's some finer details here where subspecies have been moved from Gray-eyed Bulbul into Olive Bulbul, from Fork-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo into Square-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo, and from Indian Scops-Owl into Collared Scops-Owl.  If you have seen these species, you may need to reanalyze your sightings to be sure of what form you've seen.

Bug fixes

Scythebill will now - on Windows - provide you with a warning if you're saving files into a "Program Files" directory and prompt you to move the file to another directory.  Users have done this and, while it sometimes works, it often causes problems.  (Do let me know if Scythebill is now a little too insistent at asking you to move out of this directory.)

Some Scythebill CSV imports with "spuh"s could fail under relatively unusual circumstances (but not so unusual that a user didn't find it!)

As always, Scythebill includes a number of smaller checklist improvements (along with the general updates to all of the checklists to reflect the new taxonomy).

Scythebill 13.7, with IOC 7.3 and more

Scythebill 13.7 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.    This version includes the just-released IOC 7.3 taxonomy, improvements to Scythebill's location database, and a number of bug fixes.  Thank you to all of the users who reported these bugs!  Your help in keeping Scythebill reliable is invaluable.

IOC 7.3

The IOC 7.3 release is just out, and includes a number of splits:

• All of the recent AOS updates have been incorporated, including:
• Thayer's Gull is, at long last, lumped into Iceland Gull.
• Cassia Crossbill - a form endemic to southern Idaho - is split from Red Crossbill
• Lesser Redpoll is (alas) split from Common Redpoll
• Baird's Junco is split from Yellow-eyed Junco.
• Great Grey Shrike has been split in two - the North American and eastern Asia forms are now Northern Shrike.  (There are a few proven records of Northern Shrike in the Western Palearctic, and a lot of hypothetical records.)
• Glossy Swiftlet has been split 8 ways! 
• Two southern Indian laughingthrushes (Black-chinned and Kerala) have each been split in two.
• Silktail, an enigmatic Fijian endemic, has been split in two.

You can see the full list of splits, lumps, and other changes on the IOC website.

One note:  while most of these splits are automatically handled to the extent possible, the Common/Lesser Redpoll split is not.  All sightings will be kept as Common Redpoll, unfortunately.  At a very loose level, Common Redpoll is the form in most of the world, so North American records can be left alone.  But Lesser Redpoll predominates in Great Britain and Ireland, and is common in northwestern and central Europe.  Lesser Redpoll is also the form introduced into New Zealand.

Australasia improvements

I've changed the definition of "Australasia" to more accurately match what denizens of that part of the world typically think, and now follow the Eremaea eBird definition.  In particular, this means that the following locations are now in Australasia (and out of the Pacific Ocean region)

• New Zealand, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Norfolk, and Macquarie Island

This definition does not follow the ABA listing regions.  For those of you that care about that, I've added an "Australasia (ABA)" location that can be used in reports.

There's also a new checklist within this region, for "North Solomons (Bougainville)" (politically, part of Papua New Guinea, but biogeographically part of the Solomon Islands).

And for the truly nitpicking among you, I'm working with ABA rules committee members to clarify some as-yet ambiguous rules in some of their listing regions.

Location updates

Scythebill has updated its location database to reflect the last couple years worth of changes (and to properly align with eBird).  This should mostly be pretty transparent to all of you, but if you've been birding in Latvia and have been assigning sightings to Latvian districts, that work is likely for naught;  its political organization is now totally different.

For the detail-oriented among you, the Åland Islands are no longer treated as a top-level country, but instead as a province of Finland;  this means the "Finland (with Åland Islands)" location is no longer necessary or available.

Bug fixes

The following bugs have been fixed in this version of Scythebill:

• BirdLasser imports should now be working again.  (They removed a "Location name" column from their exports which Scythebill was expecting.)
• eBird imports will work a little better in some rare cases.  (They've added yet another date format, it seems.)
• If you were building your own extended taxonomies, there were some glitches when entering sightings just after importing your own .csv taxonomy file.  Those are fixed.
• Scythebill's "choose your own abbreviation" feature did not work well for some accented characters found in Turkish names, in states like "Şırnak".
• Entering IOC sightings for the Moluccan and North Solomons Dwarf Kingfishers did not assign those sightings to the correct species!

As always, this release of Scythebill includes a number of recent country records as well as small checklist fixes here and there.

Scythebill 13.6 - IOC 7.2 is now available

Scythebill 13.6 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.    This version includes the just-released IOC 7.2 taxonomy, and includes a number of bug fixes.  Thank you to all of the users who reported these bugs!  Your help in keeping Scythebill reliable is invaluable.

IOC 7.2

The IOC 7.2 release is just out, and includes a number of splits:

• Barn Owls in the Americas are now split as American Barn Owl.
• Booted Racket-tail has been split three ways
• The Central American populations of Steely-vented Hummingbird have been split as Blue-vented Hummingbird
• Western populations of Scarlet-fronted Parakeet have been split as Cordilleran Parakeet
• Two southeast Asian bulbuls in the "Iole" genus have been split, each in two ways
• Montane Double-collared Sunbird has been split in two

You can see the full list of splits, lumps, and other changes on the IOC website.

Bug fixes

The following bugs have been fixed in this version of Scythebill:

• Checklists saved from Browse by location had two repeating rows at the top, instead of just the one intended header row.
• Imports with "spuh" common names (like Greater/Lesser Scaup) will now import correctly.
• Scythebill automatically sets "introduced" when you enter species that are known to be introduced (either from the checklists or simply because it's a domestic or feral form), but wasn't doing so for imports.  It now does so correctly.
• A glitch surrounding "First records (lifers)" reports for IOC users has been addressed.
• The New Mexico county of Doña Ana displayed oddly, with a symbol where "ñ" should be.
• A scenario where users could inadvertently corrupt their saved locations when rearranging them in Browse by locations has been fixed.
• eBird locations were not available in the UK;  that's been addressed.

As always, this release of Scythebill includes a number of recent country records as well as small checklist fixes here and there.