Progress report

Work on our long-awaited update to the Bird Guide is coming along fast! Alex has been able to devote considerable time to it recently and it is nearly ready for thorough testing. We are really looking forward to getting it finished - partly because we seem to have done little else for so long but also because it will be great to see the app as it was planned to be from the start.

April already?

My neglect of this blog is shameful! My only excuse is that little has changed - I am still working on the next Bird Guide Britain update, and squeezing in occasional Chirp updates when I have time.

The next update to the Bird Guide is a really major one with many new features. As well as new features there will be quite a few new birds, and I am also working through all the current birds, checking the information and adding new and better images. It's going to be very good! Progress has been slow this year because Alex, who does the complicated programming, is a student and has his final exams very soon. On the plus side this is giving me more time to improve the content, so the finished result will be even better!

2010, a busy year!

Looking back over 2010 I can't believe how busy we have been! At the beginning of the year we were finishing off our British Bird Guide and had started planning the new slideshow feature that we intended to add to Chirp!, when suddenly Apple announced the imminent arrival of their groundbreaking device, the iPad. We immediately shelved all other projects and worked like crazy to get an iPad version of Chirp! ready for the launch. It was fun to be in at the very start of the iPad and I'm very pleased we did experience that, but no sooner had we finished the iPad version, but we had to start updating the apps for the new iPhone 4 and its new multi-tasking feature. At this point I was wondering if we'll ever we able to resume normal operations, but fortunately (for us, anyway) Apple took a break from producing new devices and we were able to get back to routine work.

During the summer Bird Guide Britain received a complete cosmetic makeover by Marcello at Wrinkly Pea, and we also added a slew of new features, then we resumed work on the slideshow for Chirp! It took way longer than we expected to get the slideshow working in just the way we wanted, in portrait and landscape mode, and in 6 languages, but it was finally released this month - a full year since we started on it! Here's hoping faster progress will be made in 2011!

Happy New Year to you all!

Bug alert! (Bird Guide Britain)

A bug crept into the last update of Bird Guide Britain and messed up the lists of seen birds and starred birds. We have made a fix which will return the lists to their previous state, but unfortunately if you have already gone through the app and corrected the list yourself, you will have to do it all again when the update comes out. We are really very sorry about this :(. We looked into all the possible ways of correcting the fault, but the more complicated the fix, the longer it would take to implement and test, so we decided that the best course of action is to release a quick fix as soon as possible to minimise the number of people affected.

We've asked Apple to prioritise the update (which they do in cases like this) so it should be out in a few days.

A busy summer

It's been a busy busy summer! We have a new member of the Chirp! family, Chirp! Canada, we've updated Chirp! USA with a huge batch of new birds, and an update for Chirp! Europe should be out this weekend with new birds and with buttons to change the language of the bird names inside the app. We've another big new feature for Chirp! that is nearly finished so more updates will be coming soon!

Bird Guide Britain gets another update very soon and that will complete all the commonly seen birds in Britain, plus most of the locally common birds. Once that is done, we can start adding the scarcer birds, and also finish the record keeping features.

I'm sad to say that there is dirty work afoot in the UK AppStore Reference section with some developers giving competitor's apps poor reviews. I thought we'd escaped but four 1 star reviews arrived on the Chirp page this evening - a bit odd as we've consistently received almost entirely 4 and 5 star reviews for the past 18 months! If you like Chirp or the Bird Guide, please leave a nice review for us if you have time :).

Common names

I admit I was a bit dismissive of the competition, run by Natural England, The Guardian and The Oxford University Museum of Natural History, to name several rare species of invertebrates. After all, nobody has a problem with plant names such as Fucshia and Rhododendron. But now the results are in I freely admit that I was wrong - the names are wonderful! And I am sure that a newspaper article discussing the fate of the Queen’s Executioner beetle will attract the interest of far more people than an article about Megapenthes lugens! (To see the results of the naming competition, visit Buglife for a good summary).

I'm now such a convert to the cause that I think all common names should be decided by competition. It couldn't fail to produce better results than the dreary efforts of the official organisations. While preparing birds for inclusion in the Chirp! apps, I frequently find examples of official name changes, and they are usually for the worse, going for the purely descriptive. I was sorry to see that the Canadian bird sometimes called the Whiskey Jack - a great, original name with a very long heritage- is officially the Grey Jay. Grey Jay! Yes, it's grey, yes, it's a Jay, but give me Whiskey Jack any day.

PS I'm alarmed to see that apparently I haven't updated this blog since May! I'm sure I updated in June, but there's no record of it. We have continued to be ridiculously busy so maybe I forgot to press the "publish post" button. I shall try to be more diligent in future!

Chirp! Bird Songs Europe - for iPad

It's finally launch day for the iPad in the UK and much of Europe! And the iPad version of Chirp! will be available - it was approved by Apple around midnight last night, so just made it! If you are getting an iPad, or just browsing in an Apple Store, please take a look - the bird photos look great on the larger, shinier screen. Hold the iPad in landscape position to see larger bird photos, or in portrait position for a longer list to scroll through.