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Sibley Guide (1 Viewer)

njlarsen

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The last month or so, my Sibley app on the ipad has told me that a new version would come out here mid November and that it would be discounted for existing customers. I know there are many others here who have this on their device, so just wanted to tell that I found the new version today in the app store.

Niels
 
The last month or so, my Sibley app on the ipad has told me that a new version would come out here mid November and that it would be discounted for existing customers. I know there are many others here who have this on their device, so just wanted to tell that I found the new version today in the app store.

Thanks for the heads-up. An updated version has been long in coming. . ..
 
Just bought the new version of the app which is a distinct improvement over the old, particularly taxonomically (though still out-of-date in that respect as is the paper version on which it’s based). But, all said, still a bargain at the $10 introductory price.
 
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Me too, and it’s quite nice. The comparison feature is a lot of fun! Certainly very well worth $10.

I think Audubon’s free app, which has Kenn Kaufman’s extremely good text and Lang Elliott’s recordings, is generally underrated, but pretty sensational as well. Song Sleuth also has nice original art by Sibley (one picture per species), as well as Sibley’s text and a nice gauge of the likelihood of your encountering a given bird on that date in that location.

It’s a golden age!
 
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That's interesting. My app (from Apple's U.S. app store) can be granted location access either 'Never' or 'While Using the App.' If you opt for 'Never,' it won't show nearby hotspots or sightings, and it also won't automatically tag by location any lists of birds that you enter manually. (You can still enter a location by hand.) But otherwise it's entirely unaffected and should work fine.

There's no file system accessible by apps on iOS, so I've never seen a permissions request for access to files. I'm not sure what it would mean. Is the version you downloaded for Android?

My iOS Audubon app has also never requested camera access, according to the camera permissions log in Settings (or, needless to say, been granted it). I can't come up with any good reason that a field guide would need to use the camera, except for Cornell's Merlin. So that does seem like a strange request.

In any event, I haven't found the national Audubon society's iOS app to be privacy-infringing, and in terms of what it does, how thoroughly and elegantly it does it, and the cost ($0), I am very enthusiastic about it. The downside is an absence of illustrations—like Audubon's printed field guides, it uses an array of photographs for each species, rather than paintings.
 
It might be a second example of excessive access being demanded by android apps. I recently installed Whatsapp on my iphone, and could say no to excessive access and still have it work. When we tried on my wife's android phone, it wanted access to everything and if not granted refused to work.

Niels
 
I looked at it. It wants to access my location, all files and camera as a default. No way.

It seems to work fine if you subsequently turn off all those permissions.

By all accounts, the work for this program is done by a handful of very dedicated people, so I'm willing to cut them some slack. It's easier to set up a program of this type if you don't have to worry about including or excluding features, so let it install, then set the limits as you see fit.

Separately, thank you, Niels, for the heads up to download the V2 of Sibley, a definite improvement.
Surprisingly, the older version also got an upgrade to bring its appearance into line with the new version.
 
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One irritating deficiency of Sibley2, carried over from the old version, is the impossibility of searching by family name, scientific or English. If one’s confronted with a “confusing fall warbler” for example, typing “warbler” in the search box only brings up those members of the wood warbler family with “warbler” in their names, omitting such stalwarts as water thrushes, parulas, yellowthroats and the Ovenbird. Dto for ducks, thrushes, sparrows etc. One can always get to the desired (complete) family list by scrolling, of course, but why should one have to?

That said, it’s still IMO by far the best North American bird field guide app out there. . ..
 
It might be a second example of excessive access being demanded by android apps.

I have Android indeed. There is no way to install Audubon without giving it full access to my camera and location. So I did not install it.

It is currently rated at 3.7 on Google Play, which is, frankly, not good. About borderline to an usable app.
 
One irritating deficiency of Sibley2, carried over from the old version, is the impossibility of searching by family name, scientific or English. If one’s confronted with a “confusing fall warbler” for example, typing “warbler” in the search box only brings up those members of the wood warbler family with “warbler” in their names, omitting such stalwarts as water thrushes, parulas, yellowthroats and the Ovenbird. Dto for ducks, thrushes, sparrows etc. One can always get to the desired (complete) family list by scrolling, of course, but why should one have to?

That said, it’s still IMO by far the best North American bird field guide app out there. . ..

Are you using an iPhone? It works (nearly) as expected on my Android.

If I search for "shorebirds", I see everything under the shorebirds heading. If I search for "sandpiper", I see everything with sandpiper in the name. And, if I search for "calidris", I see everything in the genus.

Searching for "warbler" actually shows me more than I want to see, "wood-warbler" yields the desired results.

Because it searches the names and the group headings, it can be a bit quirky. A search for "goose" shows all the goose species. A search for "duck" shows everything in the "Swans, Geese and Ducks" group, because "duck" is in the group heading.

It wouldn't hurt to provide feedback regarding how it is working for you. They won't fix something that they don't know is a problem. I had requested the ability to search by banding code, which is now available.
 
Just checked on my iOS installation (iPad mini) and duck brings up the heading but only those members of the group containing duck in the common name are shown. Same result for sparrow though three different headings are shown.

Niels
 
It would at least be nice to have a collapsed view, where you could click on ‘New World Warblers,’ say, to expand it. The Collins British birds app handles navigation very intuitively, once you get used to it, and it allows for browsing by family and drilling down without scrolling through an almost undifferentiated list of 931 items.
 
It would at least be nice to have a collapsed view, where you could click on ‘New World Warblers,’ say, to expand it. The Collins British birds app handles navigation very intuitively, once you get used to it, and it allows for browsing by family and drilling down without scrolling through an almost undifferentiated list of 931 items.

I put something very similar in a review in the app store today. If you do the same either there or in more direct communication to them, then it might even happen.

Niels
 
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