The British Bird Fair 09 is only days away.
We'll be there on Saturday. If you would like to catch up, then just send us an email. We'd love the chance to meet you and to discuss any thoughts you may have about Bird Journal.
As Bird Journal continues to mature, we are steadying the rate of updates issued. We're very pleased with how much Bird Journal has grown, and our efforts will now begin to shift to greater marketing, and a broader product range.
Most wanted features such as Import, Quick Codes and Other Wildlife are still a priority for us, and we hope to have them completed this year.
I would at this point like to introduce Personal Journal. Personal Journal is placed as The most enjoyable way to keep a journal / diary for PCs. There is already plenty of software for writing a journal, but none of them seem to be focussed on enjoyment. Keeping a journal should be fun! It should be easy to write, and really easy to look back.
Bird Journal has already shown us that people want to enjoy looking back at their journal. Surely that's why we write them? Personal Journal will bring the same ease of use, intuitive design, modern looks, and above all, enjoyability to Journal / Diary software.
But Personal Journal is not finished yet, and with that we need your help. We have launched a questionnaire, to help us shape Personal Journal into exactly the product you want. It will take less than five minutes to complete, and we are offering a generous 25% discount off the launch price to everyone who completes it. You can even receive a complementary license, if you choose to become an early adopter.
Version 1.3 of Bird Journal has just been released. As you can see we've been quite busy. The custom properties feature in particular was requested a number of times, so we hope this update will satisfy a lot of users.
With this release we're pleased to be able to welcome birders in Australia to enjoy Bird Journal too, thanks to a taxonomy update.
We've also made the installer download size smaller, so it's now even easier to download the trial version.
What's new?
- Added: New Taxonomy, Australia - Christidis, L. and W.E. Boles.
- Added: Custom Entry and Sighting Properties. Record whatever information you wish with CheckBox, DropDownList and TextBox types.
- Added: CSV Export of a range of entries.
- Added: Dedicated fields to store eBird required data. This makes exporting to eBird much easier.
- Improved: Export action selection is now made easier, via a drop down menu.
- Improved: Help actions are now clearer, via a drop down menu, and a link has been added to the Online Support page.
- Improved: Validation no longer prevents you from leaving a field, and additional information is available via tooltips.
- Improved: Partial time values can now be entered. Eg, 12 will enter 12:00.
- Improved: AOU range now correctly specified as "North & Central America".
- Improved: Manual now has more detail for a number of features.
- Fixed: Print preview would just show lots of blank pages, for some printers.
- Fixed: Crash when trying to print, and no printers are installed.
- Fixed: Crash when using the mousewheel over the species box, and the selection popup is not visible.
- Fixed: Edit Locations screen created visual artefacts when scrolling.
- Fixed: A select few minor issues.
One of the next new features for Bird Journal is Import.
As always we want to make it really easy, and we want to make it capable of importing almost any birding records you may have.
In the Americas, eBird has made great progress in standardising birding data formats. This has lead to AviSys, Birdbase and Birder's Diary all supporting export to the eBird CSV format. We'll provide import from eBird Record format, and perhaps also eBird Checklist format.
But a lot of birders have records in Excel spreadsheets, and we'd like to be able to import from these too.
- Do you record sightings in Excel? How do you lay out your records? If possible please send us a sample, so we can try to make the import process as easy as possible.
- Would it be easy for you to convert your spreadsheets into a standard Bird Journal layout? Or would it be preferable to have a tool to auto-detect the layout of your spreadsheets?
Version 1.2 of Bird Journal is now live. In this update we've added a complete new edition - the Continent Edition. This edition includes all taxonomies available in a given continent, excluding world taxonomies, and is priced at £39 / €45 / $59. The Local Edition has been reduced in price to £29 / €35 / $45.
Our website now accepts payments via PayPal, instead of SWReg. This makes the order process much clearer and easier. I also think most people are more comfortable with PayPal.
What else is new in Bird Journal 1.2?
- Calendar date picker.
- Species entry improvements. Improves clarity, discoverability and speed of entry.
- New Taxonomies: Ireland - IRBC and Spain - SEO. The Spanish list includes English, Spanish and Catalan names.
- Support for our new continent edition.
- The installation process now automatically installs the .Net Framework if needed.
We hope you will enjoy using this new version.