Hey, there’s an update available! You can install it now. A lot of the changes this time were inspired by you, my dear users, who sent me feedback! The Clements/eBird taxonomy got an update after over a year, so I’ve incorporated the latest taxonomy and updated the AOS and ABA checklists. And I fixed some things that iOS 15 broke :-).
The most noticeable features besides the updated taxonomy are Achievements, new sorting orders, and smarter searches. Each are described below along with all the other changes.
The main screen — a list of checklists, sorted by List Type
Lists sorted by Species Count
What’s new in this release:
• Updated taxonomy — Birdathon has been updated using the following sources: the Clements/eBird taxonomy from August 2021, the ABA checklist from July 2021, and the AOS checklist from June 2021. For Santa Clara County, our checklist changed Mew Gull to Short-billed Gull (taxonomic name change) and added Mitred Parakeet (which the ABA now deems countable).
The new Achievements screen — tell me what you want to see here
• Improved compatibility with iOS 15. This mostly means fixes for drawing or graphical layout of user interface elements
• Achievements — when you tap on the checklist count at the top of the screen, you'll now see a few fun statistics, such as how many species and bird families you've seen. This was suggested by a user sending feedback — let me know what you think and what other achievements you'd like to see added!
• Improved searches — In checklists, search now ignores leading and trailing blank spaces and doesn't require that you type hyphens (I'm looking at you Black-crowned Night-Heron!) or apostrophes (and you Chuck-will's-widow). This might be a good time to remind you that you can use four-letter codes (Black Phoebe is 'blph' for example) and add a count to your search (e.g. "bcnh 100" or "100 bcnh" plus a tap will increment Black-crowned Night-Heron by 100). This feature was also suggested by a user who sent their most-welcome feedback.
• You now have the ability to sort the list of lists by Species Count (most to least) and Theme (color). Pretty cool to see at a glance which checklists have the most species recorded (see screenshot above). And I added Theme just because it seemed helpful; you can use the theme colors any way you like, and of course change them for any list at any time, so it's a way you can organize your lists your way.
• Added a setting to include family names in searches (for example, search results for 'flycatchers' would include 'Black Phoebe' even though 'flycatchers' isn't in its name). This setting is off by default. The previous release searched family names all the time (it was a new feature at the time) which could sometimes bring up too many results. This feature was suggested by a user sending feedback. In Settings you can also turn on or off the inclusion of Scientific Name in the searches.
• Tapping the checkbox in a checklist now increments the observed count (you can disable this in Settings by turning off "Enable One Tap"). I've been going back and forth on whether this should be the default — I don't want accidental taps to increment bird counts, but at the same time I want it to be as easy as possible to record data. Anyway, it's a Setting, so pick which one works best for you.
• Improved imports: When importing a straight text file of common names you can choose to create a list template or import as a filled-in checklist. The count will be 1 for each species and the date/time will be the time of the import. Files exported from Birdathon using "Export Summary to CSV" can also be imported as a template or a checklist.
• If you download your checklists from eBird, you can now import them to create a checklist. Note that not all the data in an eBird checklist gets imported into Birdathon — most notably, the map location and the checklist comments are lost, as eBird doesn't export that information.
• Files on iCloud Drive that hadn't yet been synced with your device are now handled correctly.
• Changing a template will now also change the custom rarity of already-observed birds if the new template contains custom rarities (e.g. the Santa Clara County 2021 Checklist). If the new template does not have a custom rarity for the bird, it's custom rarity will remain unchanged.
• Fixed a bug on the iPod touch (and possibly other small-screen iOS devices) where the "Start" button was disabled when attempting to create a new checklist. That kind of made it hard to start a new checklist.
• Made searching all checklists a little more efficient. Note that you have to tap "search" before it'll show you all the checklists matching your query — this is because live updating of search results for all checklists got way too slow when you have many checklists. Anyway, on the main screen if you swipe down to reveal the search field, type 'blph' and tap "search" you'll see every checklist for which you've observed a Black Phoebe. You will need to type the hyphens for bird names when searching all the checklists because I couldn't make that fast enough (yeah, Black-crowned Night-Heron, you know how to slow us down, don't you? Well 'bcnh' works, so ha! Take that!)
• In the Summary view, the button for setting date ranges stopped working. This bug was found by an observant user!
• The Summary view now remembers the last date range you selected.
• Fixed a bug in Summary view where the date range calculations could incorrectly use non-bird observations or observations in checklists that had "Include in Summary" disabled.
• Launch time is improved, including that first launch after updating Birdathon when it looks over every checklist you've created.
• Fixed a bug on the eBird Report screen where overriding the calculated checklist duration wasn't remembered (duration is calculated by measuring the time difference between the checklist start time and the last observation you made). Now it remembers that you typed your own Duration.
• At the bottom of the checklist, you might have noticed that tapping the tally (e.g. "13/409 birds") brings up some statistics for your checklist. It shows the calculated duration of your checklist (the time between the checklist start time and the final observation), but if at some point you edited the duration on the eBird Report screen the statistics will now show you both the Calculated Duration and the Reported Duration.
• Fixed a drawing issue (overlapping text) in view for bird observation records
• The List Statistics (button at the bottom of a checklist) also now shows you the list name and type
• In the Settings screen, "About Birdathon" now shows the version, and is blue to make it clear it's a link to more information
• Lots of other little bug fixes and layout tweaks to make things look and behave nicely.
• I am always looking for ideas on how to make Birdathon better and more useful for your checklisting needs. Please send feedback to birdathon@voyageropen.com with your cool ideas, bug reports or just to say "hello" and let me know how Birdathon works for you.
Happy birding!