Whatbird.com

Please use this forum thread to tell us what features you would like to see added to Winged Explorer. This can include changes to exisiting features. Feel free to comment on any exisiting feature and how you would improve it.

It would save a step if WE would remember the last location selected, maybe even the last habitat(s) when starting a new search.

 

Alan

 

techguru:

It would save a step if WE would remember the last location selected, maybe even the last habitat(s) when starting a new search.

 

 

Building on the above, favorite searches.  Being able to save combinations of location, habitat, etc to speed up searches could be useful. 

 

Alan 

For devices that are connected to or have built in GPS, having the location auto-selected and the coordinates saved when an observation is made would be cool.

Alan

It seems that adding additional colors increases the list, rather then narrowing it to birds with the selected combination of colors.  This does not seem intuitive to me.

 

Alan

 

I like this idea. It would be easy to do on the History tab, so it would have its own menu with favrorites on it (new, open, save, etc) and be modeled like the current LifeList favorites (have you see those?). I dont know about saving the last location, it seems it would be easy to forget you set it that way. And you would be saying "why is my list so short? Oh I have it set to Hawaii"

Yes this is a no brainer and I would do it in a heartbeat if there was a STANDARD involved, but GPS on the windows mobile platform is a patchwork. Now if it was on the iPhone you would be confident it would work just fine. But from what I see few windows mobile devices have an API available for GPS and you dont know what hardware is being used.

The OR functionality of searching is actually intentional. If you default to AND you will easily end up with 0 birds matched. What we do on the web site is allow you to switch to AND right there on the page and we should do that on WE as well.

Mitchell Waite:

Yes this is a no brainer and I would do it in a heartbeat if there was a STANDARD involved, but GPS on the windows mobile platform is a patchwork. Now if it was on the iPhone you would be confident it would work just fine. But from what I see few windows mobile devices have an API available for GPS and you dont know what hardware is being used.

I think even if you just supported NMEA devices through the Windows Mobile GPS intermediate driver you would get 98% of the GPS's out there.  (of course, the GPS Intermediate driver is only on WM6 and above I believe.).

 

Alan 

techguru:

Mitchell Waite:

Yes this is a no brainer and I would do it in a heartbeat if there was a STANDARD involved, but GPS on the windows mobile platform is a patchwork. Now if it was on the iPhone you would be confident it would work just fine. But from what I see few windows mobile devices have an API available for GPS and you dont know what hardware is being used.

I think even if you just supported NMEA devices through the Windows Mobile GPS intermediate driver you would get 98% of the GPS's out there.  (of course, the GPS Intermediate driver is only on WM6 and above I believe.)

That sounds intriguing, I did not know WM6 had established a driver. That is half the battle. But isnt it a fact that you have to have an outboard GPS device synced through Bluetooth to your mobile device in order to access GPS information. I have not seen a WM6 touch screen smartphone yet with good built in GPS, but maybe HTC has one.

Most of the newest devices have built in GPS, but the carriers don't necessarily activate it in the custom ROM's.  AT&T does.  Sprint has stated (and the ROM has been leaked, so likely true) that they will be releasing an upgrade to the Touch.  I think they already did for the Mogul.

 

Verizon is tight lipped about it so far, but their new "any device" certification policy means that we'll probably see availability on their network soon too (and again, the leaked and custom kitchen ROM's available can add it even to a Verizon device).

 

I haven't been willing to risk wrecking my VX6900 yet with a hacked ROM but I do have  Bluetooth GPS that works fine.  Supports NMEA and every program I have tried it with works fine.

 

Alan

 

techguru:

Most of the newest devices have built in GPS, but the carriers don't necessarily activate it in the custom ROM's.  AT&T does.  Sprint has stated (and the ROM has been leaked, so likely true) that they will be releasing an upgrade to the Touch.  I think they already did for the Mogul.

Verizon is tight lipped about it so far, but their new "any device" certification policy means that we'll probably see availability on their network soon too (and again, the leaked and custom kitchen ROM's available can add it even to a Verizon device).

I haven't been willing to risk wrecking my VX6900 yet with a hacked ROM but I do have  Bluetooth GPS that works fine.  Supports NMEA and every program I have tried it with works fine.

What about battery drain with the extra GPS chip? Do you need an active account to use the GPS? I have heard that this so called open network that Verizon is bragging about is not going to be that open.

Mitchell Waite:

techguru:

Most of the newest devices have built in GPS, but the carriers don't necessarily activate it in the custom ROM's.  AT&T does.  Sprint has stated (and the ROM has been leaked, so likely true) that they will be releasing an upgrade to the Touch.  I think they already did for the Mogul.

Verizon is tight lipped about it so far, but their new "any device" certification policy means that we'll probably see availability on their network soon too (and again, the leaked and custom kitchen ROM's available can add it even to a Verizon device).

I haven't been willing to risk wrecking my VX6900 yet with a hacked ROM but I do have  Bluetooth GPS that works fine.  Supports NMEA and every program I have tried it with works fine.

What about battery drain with the extra GPS chip? Do you need an active account to use the GPS? I have heard that this so called open network that Verizon is bragging about is not going to be that open.

 

Battery drain is a concern, although since it uses assisted GPS when you have a cell signal, it gets a fix very fast so you can turn it on and off as needed.

 Alan

 

I was birding at Cape May NJ this weekend and trying to identify some sandpipers in poor lighting.  At one point, they were flushed and I thought I finally had spotted a diagnostic field mark, a stripe up the back in flight.  It seemed I had narrowed them down to long billed dowitcher until I looked at the range map and realized that it would be impossible at this time of year (I now believe they were short billed dowitcher, but I am still not 100% sure).

 

Anyway, it dawned on me that if we could combine the location and date information, it would help to narrow the posibilities to those that actually are possible.

 

Alan

 

Yes you are totally correct, but adding such a feature is a very difficult thing to do. You would have to narrow your location down by not just state but more exacting details such as zip code, then we would need to enter the month. The hard part is obtaining the date/location information, there are very few web sites that offer such data, ebird is the only one I know of. We'll do it some day I am sure.