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1400 Dover Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93103 USA
Phone/Fax: (805) 963 4886
E-Mail: sbsp@aol.com
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Santa Barbara Software Products 1400 Dover Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93103 USA Phone/Fax: (805) 963 4886 E-Mail: sbsp@aol.com |
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| Product and price | How intuitive | Dependability | Task potential | Ease of use | Aesthetic output | How 'International' | Average |
| Thayer's $124.95 /£70.00/EUR 102 |
4.0 | 3.5 | 5.0 | 4.0 | 5.0 | 4.5 | 4.3 |
| AviSys *$159.90/£90.00/EUR132 |
4.5 | 5.0 | 4.5 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.3 |
| Wildlife Lister $125/£69.50/EUR102 |
5.0 | 3.5 | 4.0 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.3 |
| **BirdBase/BirdArea $120/£65.50/EUR 97 |
4.5 | 5.0 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.0 | 4.5 | 4.5 |
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Table 1. Marks out of 5 for the four birding software packages. Dependability refers to how many bugs were found, Task potential is how advanced the system is in relation to the amount of different tasks it can perform, Ease of use is a trade-off to how complex the system is and how simple it is to use the complexities, Aesthetic output refers to the look of the trip reports, and How 'International' refers to how unbiased it is to one particular nationality. (*with Nation Checklist Add-On, **with sub-species add-on).
FROM THE USERS FORUM OF THE WEB SITE FOR THAYER'S PROGRAM BIRDER'S DIARY
Re: Fatal Error - BD no longer runs First, I appreciate your taking all the time to try to help me with my problem. However, I have used BD since I think version 1.3 and have a lot of data entrusted to it. This has made me very leery of BD 3.0 and makes me think that you have tackled too ambitious a project for a small shop like yours in creating such a massively complex program that you cannot debug. This program has to be reliable and maybe you need to consider making it simpler to make it more reliable. How can a major problem of this magnitude simply go into the "we have no idea what is going on" category? I have more than 10,000 observations logged into BD. These data are very dear to me and to lose access to them would be a horrible loss.
Here is where I am so far. I have not resorted to using System Restore. I moved
the data folder to a zip drive with my data base and its backup. I uninstalled
BD 3.0 completely using the custom uninstall to ensure that everything was
removed. I cold booted. I reinstalled BD 3.0. Without restoring my data, I
simply tried to run BD. I got the same error message.
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Dear Santa Barbara Software staff,
I thought I would pass on my comments about
Birdbase versus Avisys 4.56. I've been using Birdbase with BirdArea for over 2
years now and have approximately 42,000 records in BirdBase. I was curious
about the alternatives for World listing and so decided to give Avisys with
BirdArea a go. After a good deal of fooling around and getting to know Avisys
I decided to stick with BirdBase. The reasons are this:
(1) My notes have always been organized by
trips and the format for entering BirdBase records is a trip or site, whatever
duration the user decides. The transition to a combination of "places" from a
quick look up table and "keywords", "z-lists" and names you can enter yourself
in the comments section in Avisys is overly complicated. It also means
attaching the same "field note" with details to every record or having more
detailed site information lacking. The need to decide on a strategy for
listing in Avisys is also restrictive - if all the information is stored why
should a user have to describe what level of sites (e.g. counties, cities,
individual sites) will be given priority for tracking records? The lack of
site (and trip) oriented structure in Avisys is revealed by a comment in the
manual "When you happen by the Interstate 5 rest stop at Buttonwillow, CA and
see an interesting bird, you certainly won't create a Site to record it -
you'll probably not bird there again if you can help it. You will most likely
assign that sighting directly to California" I disagree, if you see a bird
worth recording, it is also worthwhile to accurately record its locality. The
BirdBase alphabetical scroll down list of sites you have chosen to store seems
far more flexible in this regard. Avisys prides itself on its full manual, but
the overly complicated structure of the program makes the long manual
necessary, whereas BirdBase and BirdArea are much simpler to follow. Avisys
does allow a more flexible structure for recording states or provinces in
countries other than the U.S. where they are not in BirdBase's structure.
(2) BirdBase more easily accesses quick
statistics, such as how many species you have and have not seen in a country
by summarizing this information on its checklists. Getting equivalent
information in Avisys means listing species seen and species not seen in a
country in two separate operations, or changing the checklist in use to read
this information from the screen as a separate operation from printing a
checklist. Also the on-screen checklist for selecting species displays either
common or scientific names, not both, and both are useful when operating in
regions where the common names change frequently enough that its hard to be
certain what the common name refers to.
(3) Yes Avisys gives more flexible output but
I would not use this output directly anyway, I'm far more likely to format it
myself in Word or Excel before printing it myself. Both programs refuse to
give me the following directly: A date or date range, each place with a list
of species seen together with the notes I have entered for these species
starting with the most recently visited site and ending with the last visited
site. This is the kind of information many birders would write in a notebook in
the field and would like to be able to produce easily if we skip the notebook
in favor of a computer.
(4) When I ordered AviSys I was led to expect
a more up-to-date and advanced user interface and more flexibility. Some of
this is true, but the basic structure of the program is rather similar. I very
much disliked the inability to fix a trip profile directly and being forced to
go through the rather tedious mass edit feature to do things like change the
comments for all species within a site, or to unlink a "place" so that it
could be deleted from the places table.
You are free to use these comments as you
wish.
With best wishes
Marcel Holyoak.
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