blueBill Mobile for Android 0.15 released
27-Aug-2010 11:31 - Filed under: ReleasesAs anticipated a couple of weeks ago, we introduced an originally unplanned release for blueBill in order to accomodate the request of a user who asked for adding a checklist for supporting a trip to Southern Africa by the end of August. So we've just released blueBill Mobile 0.15 which adds the support for the “Roberts VII edition” checklist (with common names in english, german and afrikaans). We also corrected an intermittent defect that sometimes made the download of songs to fail because apparently the space on the memory card was exhausted (while it wasn't so).
We'd also like to take advantage of this post to thank our users - a week ago we passed the 1,000 downloads milestone.
If you have blueBill Mobile already installed on your Android phone, it is possible to upgrade by checking the list of installed applications by clicking on the "Market" icon.
Please be aware that upgrading will erase your current list of observations; save them before upgrading.
Where's my Cormorant?
23-Aug-2010 08:22 - Filed under: On the fieldWe have received some feedback about the unability of finding some common species in the checklists. Defects are always possible, but the checklists are very complete - they are made by local ornithology societies and contain all the species that have been identified and confirmed at least once in a given geographic area. So, it's unlikely that the species you're searching for is unavailable. You should consider two facts when picking a species:
- Official names are used, and this means that there could be an extra word in front of the name you're thinking of. For instance, with the EBN Italia 2003 list and the UK-english language, there is “Common kingfisher”, “Eurasian spoonbill”, “Great cormorant”, while you probably are searching for “Kingfisher”, “Spoonbill”, “Cormorant”.
- When you filter names with the keyboard, there are four different filters that you can select. The one active by default is called “smart with initial” and always filters the species matching the first keystroke with the initial. This means that if you type “k” for the Kingfisher, you won't be able to find it because of the “Common”. Please try all the available filters and use the one you prefer.
Here are some examples. Supposing you've selected the checklist EBNItalia 2003, UK-english as primary language, no secondary language, these are the keys you have to type to find a “Common kingfisher” or a “Great cormorant” with the four different filters:
Smart with initial
Common kingfisher: c k n g
Great cormorant: g c r m
Smart
Common kingfisher: k n g f
Great cormorant: c r m r n t
Initials
Common kingfisher: c k
Great cormorant: g c
Exact substring
Common kingfisher: k i n g
Great cormorant: c o r m
Filters are described in the “Getting started” document.
We're studying how to make the filter smarter, perhaps by ignoring common words such as “African”, “American”, “Eurasian”, “European”, or “Common”. Give us your feedback if you have some ideas.
blueBill Mobile for Android 0.14.1 released
18-Aug-2010 11:30 - Filed under: ReleasesA new version of blueBill Mobile for Android has been released which addresses a number of defects that have been detected with 0.14.
In particular, blueBill Mobile is now visible in the Android Market by means of smartphones with low resolution screens; a defect has been corrected that, in some configurations of default languages settings for the smartphones, prevented common names of birds from being visible by default (it was required the explicit language configuration in the preferences to work around the problem); changing the date of an observation no more causes a crash with smartphones running Android 2.2 .
If you have blueBill Mobile already installed on your Android phone, it is possible to upgrade by checking the list of installed applications by clicking on the "Market" icon.
Please be aware that upgrading will erase your current list of observations; save them before upgrading.
The meaning of openness
13-Aug-2010 12:11 - Filed under: MiscellaneousblueBill Mobile is a Free and Open Source Software. What does it mean in practice? That the software is yours, user, as much as ours, developers. It means that you can ask for new features and even give us your contribution, that we'll make available to everyone. Contributing a new feature is of course the fastest way to have it released for use.
We are pleased to say that we have just received the first contributions:
- A german fellow birder who's planning a trip in Southern Africa has sent us the data about the Roberts checklist for the birds in that area. About 1,000 species will be available in english, german and afrikaan languages. Since the trip is going to happen soon, we have rescheduled our plans in order to deliver it in time.
- Another fellow birder is working on providing the german localization for the application. We don't know yet when this new feature will be ready.
In the Developers page we're going to provide a document that should be signed by most people that are willing to make contributions, in order to guarantee that they are available to everybody in compliance with the project license.
We will provide in the next days an update to our plans, also taking in consideration that we have identified a problem that is preventing some models of Android smartphones to see blueBill Mobile in the Android Market (while it is anyway available in alternate markets).
blueBill Mobile for Android 0.14 released
10-Aug-2010 00:30 - Filed under: ReleasesThere has been a further week delay on the delay, but now blueBill Mobile 0.14 is here. As anticipated, it only contains a part of the features that were originally planned for the end of July: the fact sheet improvements have been postponed to the end of August / beginning of September.
The new release introduces the capability of picking different checklists and makes available the American Ornithologists' Union checklist for North America, 7th edition. Species names are available in US English and Canadian French. This new feature makes it possible to use blueBill Mobile in the North American continent.
Some defects have been corrected:
- "Anas carolinensis" and "Larus heuglini" were missing from the EBN Italia 2003 checklist and have been added.
- The American English translations for the Western Palearctic birds are now correctly rendered.
- There are no more truncations in person and place names with accents and other non-latin characters in the Calls fact sheet.
- Orders / Families / Genera lists now are always properly sorted.
- The Calls fact sheet should also load faster.
For the EBN Italia 2003 checklist, the availability of two different english translations might cause some confusion, as some species have different names. For this reason, in all the screens involving a species selection now both the checklist and the current language(s) used for species are shown in a status bar at the bottom of the screen. Please recall that the languages used for rendering species can be selected independently of the default language of the smartphone.
If you have blueBill Mobile already installed on your Android phone, it is possible to upgrade by checking the list of installed applications by clicking on the "Market" icon.
Please be aware that upgrading will erase your current list of observations; save them before upgrading.
Delay...
29-Jul-2010 12:02 - Filed under: ReleasesThe original plans for the next release were about July 31st - but a technical problem with our engineering facilities and the fact that the photo fact sheets haven't been tested enough is forcing us to change. On the other hand, the support for the North American birds is ready and tested - more than 2,000 species from the American Ornithologists' Union, of which 1,600 have got song support from xeno-canto. We're evaluating what to do: either delaying the whole release around August 7th, or split the release and have the North American birds ready for August 2nd/3rd, and the photo fact sheets around mid August. Stay tuned. Thanks for your comprehension.
blueBill Mobile for Android 0.13.0 released
7-Jul-2010 10:13 - Filed under: ReleasesA new version of blueBill Mobile for Android is available, delivering two main features.
First, there's a news reader connected to our blog feed, so you'll be able to stay informed about blueBill Mobile without having to open a browser. We will also publish tutorials and tips to the blog, that you'll be able to access right from inside the application. blueBill Mobile checks and downloads news only when you enable internet connections, and no more than once per day; in case of unread news, a notification automatically appears in the status bar of the smartphone.
Secondarily, we're improved the look and feel of the user interface in many parts, specially the Calls Fact Sheet, which is now more intuitive. As usual, also minor defects have been corrected, included some improper translations in French language.
If you have blueBill Mobile already installed on your Android phone, it is possible to upgrade by checking the list of installed applications by clicking on the "Market" icon.
Please be aware that upgrading will erase your current list of observations; save them before upgrading.
The American birds are coming
5-Jul-2010 15:35 - Filed under: Future featuresA very short anticipation for the update planned for the end of July: we're going to have a checklist for the North American birds (about 2,000 species), taken from the public information by the American Ornithologists' Union. Sounds like if you are living in USA, Canada or Mexico will be able to enjoy blueBill mobile soon.
blueBill Mobile for Android 0.12.1 released
29-Jun-2010 09:44 - Filed under: ReleasesA new version of blueBill Mobile for Android has been released, estabilishing an important milestone for the project. In fact, there is a brand new feature that paves the way for a whole set of features that will see the light in future: multi-media fact sheets. blueBill Mobile now gives easy access to the bird song database of xeno-canto. As a starter, more than 6,000 recordings from 680 bird species are available and can be individually downloaded and played off-line.
It is also possible to create and share a KML file for an observation report. In this way, data can be easily imported in Google Earth or into other geographical applications.
Traveling birdwatchers will also appreciate the “Names” fact sheet, which gives access, for each bird species, to the localized names in ten diferent languages. Also, we have provided the full localization of the application in french language.
As usual, a number of smaller defects have been corrected.
If you have blueBill Mobile already installed on your Android phone, it is possible to upgrade by checking the list of installed applications by clicking on the "Market" icon.
Please be aware that upgrading will erase your current list of observations; save them before upgrading.
Privacy note. With the new version, when you connect to the internet to download media, your phone will transmit some information to us: the model, the manufacturer, the operating system version and the language. They will be used for statistic purposes (including finding out defects with some specific handsets and guessing which localization are more important). No personal information, no geographic information and no data about your observations is transmitted.
Future features
12-Jun-2010 15:04 - Filed under: Future featuresThis post is the first of the brand new category “Future features”. We will illustrate some of the features that will be introduced in new blueBill Mobile versions and that are in an advanced development stage. Before talking about the first, we'd like to spend a few words to describe how the release process of blueBill Mobile is structured.
First, have a look at the version number, which is composed by three parts: x.y.z. The first number is still zero, which means that the application is young and missing some aspects of the Quality Assurance. Every new release is made available only after it has been used for a couple of days on the field; but we are preparing a program of automated tests, that will also run on multiple emulated devices, to make the process quicker, also considering the future where there will be much more functions to test. When the automated tests will be ready, we will move to a 1.y.z. schema. The second digit increases (e.g. from 0.10.0 to 0.11.0) every time there are substantially new features. The third number increases for minor releases, where typically we're just fixing some bugs.
In the first month of life we have roughly published a release per week. Now that the application sounds more stable, we're planning of making a release per month, more or less (unless users warn us of urgent defects to fix). For advanced users, we will make it possible to install intermediate “hot” versions of the application, in case they want to try out new stuff that is not ready for use.
And now, what's coming? One of the thing that should be available for 0.12.0 is the capability of attaching a KML file to reports. In this way, geotagged observations can be shared and immediately opened with Google Earth (or other equivalent software). Importing these files under Google Earth can be a very simple but effective way to archive daily observations.
Generally speaking, one of the aims of blueBill Mobile is to enable people to manage their data as they like more, and to eventually post them to online databases, so further ways to export data will be available in future. Any suggestion in this area is welcome.
