Thought I’d give the new set up time to grow on me before I said my piece, and having given it time my first opinions haven’t changed.
I really still don’t like the website, but have nothing to add to what’s already been said, but the greatest loss for me has been the scrapping of Bird News Anywhere and its replacement with, well, nothing at all. Nothing of any real equivalence anyway. I see people praising the app, and don’t really understand, because it’s a colossal step back from what we had before. The app simply vomits a great indiscriminate stream of news which you then have to trawl through to find what you want. Sure, you can set up filters, which is great if you know in advance what information you’re going to want to extract, but is far from versatile. The beauty of BNE is that you could interrogate it, quickly and easily, getting the gen you want, when you want it, without reams of irrelevant information. This has now been replaced by a dumb list. Oh, but we get a teeny tiny picture of what the bird in question might (but quite likely doesn’t) look like (whilst no longer being able to quickly link to photos of the actual bird), and a comically unreliable pin on a map to show you where the bird probably isn’t. Anyone looking to provide a bird information system via smartphone would do well to address this ability to interrogate the information quickly and cleanly, from being able to extract news by rarity, regionally and a combination of the two without the need to set up filters in advance, to being able to access complete accounts of a bird’s stay rather than just where it is and what it happens to be doing today.
I do wonder if any of the original Birdguides Team is upset about what has been done to their good work, because it really was very good. If so, then you have my heartfelt sympathies and most sincere gratitude. If you actually think this new set up is an improvement on what you’d done before, well then, I do not understand you.