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RETAIL VERSION WILL BE AVAILABLE ON OCTOBER 10 2008 - IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS YOU CAN CONTACT US HERE .
FREE FIELD GUIDE WITH EACH WINGED EXPLORER PURCHASE
main screen text view
Bird identification has never been like this - Winged Explorer finds your bird in seconds. Just a few clicks on the location, shape, and color icons and you are listening to your species' song, viewing the full size color illustration, checking the range map and learning the bird's habits. A powerful patented identification search engine is the secret. You don't need to be a birding expert either. The visual approach means if you know where you are and can remember any detail you'll find the bird.
4000 Pages
Because of digital storage the detail is astonishing - equivalent to 4,000 pages of information. You may have guessed by now we are excited about this product. And there is a reason. Winged Explorer is the result of 4 solid years of development of the Whatbird search engine, which began in 2004 as a small desktop application and grew into the gold standard of avian search engines: one half million visitors a month reading over 2.4 million pages.
Multiple Views
You can view the 891 birds in the Winged Explorer database several ways - a text view of common North American species names - or by icon view where each species is represented by its small postage stamp size images. The icon view makes it easy to recognize the bird you are trying to identify. Both views can be sorted by first name last name or by last name first name, which groups most of the birds in a family together so they are easier to located. The list can be sorted alphabetically or taxonomically.
Auto Suggestions
If you know the name of the bird you are looking for you can simply
type it into the search box and Winged Explorer will start suggesting
names as you type. As the letters are typed the match list of birds is
whittled down before your eyes until only those with the name you typed
appear.
Now simply tap with your stylus on a name and you are taken immediately to the species page for that bird where you can read about the bird, listen to its song, view its range map, and much more. At anytime you can go back to your match list and pick a different species or you can view your match list one species at a time (essentially rotating through the list.
Tabbed Interface
Winged Explorer uses a tabbed interface. Each tab covers a major area of functionality - think of it as sections of a book you will often return to - species pages, search page with match list of bird name, a history page that keeps track of your searches and a Life List tab for recording your observations.
+ TABBED INTERFACE (click for details)
Tabbed interface puts everything at your fingertips
+ SPECIES PAGES (click for details)
SPECIES
Species Page - Every bird in the Winged Explorer database has a set of species pages which contain extensive information. On each page the common, family and species name is displayed on the upper left while the upper right holds a navigation toolbar. The small green arrows allow you to move forward or backward through the species that matched your search. The small speaker icon lets you listen to the bird's song while the push pin is used for creating an observation for the Life List (explained below).
There is one unique navigation feature of Winged Explorer called the horizontal sliding menu which you can see at the bottom of the page as the set of green buttons with arrows on either side. This menu allows you to access 8 screens of each species with one tap. You can also access the species pages using the Species menu in the lower right. The slider is just faster as it needs only one tap.
Range Maps - Each species has a range map that shows where the bird is found throughout the year, including summer, winter locations and migration routes. If the bird is rare you will find small dots indicating the few sightings. The maps cover all of North America including the Aleutian Islands and Mexico. Below each map is a detailed description of the birds range and habitat, as shown here for the American Goldfinch:
"Breeds from southern British Columbia east to Newfoundland and south to California, Utah, southern Colorado, central Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the Carolinas. Spends winters throughout much of U.S.; prefers brushy thickets, weedy grasslands, and nearby trees."
Zoom and Pan - Tired of the postage-stamp sized drawings in Sibley, Peterson and the National Geographic Field Guides? Then you will love this feature: the toolbar at the bottom right of the species page contains a magnifying glass that when tapped blows up the illustration to four times (4X) its normal size. Then you can use the stylus to drag the illustration around the screen, revealing close up details you would not normally see in a printed book.
A second magnifying icon with a "-" in it shrinks the image back to its default size.
Sexes and Plumage's - The small numbers in the zoom toolbar represent variations available for viewing for the species. In this case we see the female American Goldfinch accessed by the "2". The juvenile will appear if you tap the "3".. These additional illustrations can also be zoomed and panned.
Technical Details - Want to know every single detail about this bird? You'll find it on the Identify page. Divided into body, head and flight it covers the obvious details such as length, weight, size and color. But the page goes much further including the color of the underparts, upperparts, back, belly and breast pattern, color of the eye, crown, forehead, nap, throat and cere.
Then there is more information on flight related items including flight pattern, wingspan size and shape, tail size and shape, even the leg color is identified.
Behavioral Details - Here you will find the kind of information that most field guides leave out, unless it's the kind of book that weighs 10 pounds. Everything about the species behavior from general identification information to range and habitat, breeding and nesting, foraging and feeding and much more. Here is a list of what you will find:
General
Breeding Type
Range and Habitat
Egg Color
Breeding and Nesting
Number of Eggs
Foraging and Feeding
Incubation Days
Readily Eats
Egg Incubator
Similar Species
Nest Material
Breeding Location
Migration
Interesting and Rare Facts - The feature provides a host of cool and little known facts about each bird. For example did you know that the American Goldfinch is one of the latest nesting birds in North America, or that if a Cowbird lays an egg in its nest it will not survive because the seed based diet provided by parent's cant support it? And each bird contains a list of collective nouns for describing it, for a group of these birds is called a "charm" or "treasury" of Goldfinches.
Similar Birds - This page lists birds that may be mistaken for the species you are trying to ID. Tap on a name will take you directly to the birds page. Another feature that a book can't offer.
Similar Sounding - This is perhaps the most outstanding feature of Winged Explorer. The songs or calls of all the birds that sound like the bird you are examining are listed. You can tap and name with you stylus and instantly compare them. In the American Goldfinch you can hear how the Lawrence's, Lesser and Pine Siskin sound.
And here is a treat - hold your device up and tap the sound to see if you can attract the bird to you. Changes are if its the right species you will see the bird look your way, even fly over to you to find out more. This is called "phishing".
You will also find the mnemonic for the bird's call so you can practice imitating it in the field.
+ LIFE LIST (click for details)
LIFE LIST
Who, When Where - Winged Explorer offers a way to record and manage all your bird observations in what is called a Life List (although it can be any kind of list not just all the birds you see in your life). At the top of every species page is a small red push pin:
When you tap the pin with your stylus you are taken to the "observation form" for the species, specifically the Who When and Where form as shown here. You now can fill out information about your sighting, including a title (so you can classify the forms), who made the observation (in case you share the device with others) and a description of what you saw. The date and time is filled out automatically for you using the built in calendar and clock. The form allows capturing a lot more information such as city, state, zip, country, geographic coordinates (GPS), weather, etc.
Sighting - The Sighting tab of the Life List Observation form lets you enter details about the bird itself including how many you saw (good for bird counts), sex, age, condition, and additional notes.
In the future the Life List data on your device will be synced with a Life List feature on the whatbird.com web site. There will also be a way to create multiple lists, so that you can have one set up for different bird tours for example.
Multiple Observations - You may wish to record multiple sightings of the same bird, say on different dates or different locations. Therefore each bird may have multiple observations which appear as "tiles" like the one shown here for the Black-headed Grosbeak. Each additional observation appears as a new tile in this list.
Life List - The sum total of all your sightings appears in the Life List as shown here. Pins may have three colors - red, yellow or green. These signify the status of the observation. A red pin means no observation has been made. A yellow pin means you have made an observation but not yet filled out the details. This allows you to quickly note you made the observation then fill in the information about it later when you are in a more relaxed environment. A green pin indicates you have filled out a minimum amount of information, specifically observer and title of the sighting form.
Favorites - In order to avoid filling out a form with the same information over and over, you can set up Favorites. These are like templates that contain fixed information. You can see the menu for Favorites in the screen here. It lets you open a favorite for editing the contents, make a new favorite, apply a particular favorite to a form, rename, delete or duplicate a favorite.
In essence the Life List and favorites is a mini database application specifically designed for birders.
+ SEARCH (click for details)
SEARCH
Search and Sort Mode - While high quality species pages are wonderful they mean nothing if you can't figure out which ones to look at. The real power of Winged Explorer is its search engine which is essentially made up of a series of "filters". Each filter represents a characteristic or attribute which all birds share, such as shape, color, location, habitat, etc. Your job is to select a values for these filters and in turn Winged Explorer displays or "matches" just those species with that value. So if you select the "color" filter and select the value "red" only birds that have red color in them are displayed. We call the list of birds the "match list. There are a total of 14 filters, with 4 showing here.
The match list is initially sorted alphabetically by common name. The filters are accessed by the horizontal slider with the blue buttons or via the Search menu.
Last First Sort Mode - You can switch the match window to display the birds by last name, first name as shown here. This allows you to see species grouped by families which can greatly help you isolate a particular bird.
But you need to keep in mind that not all birds in a family have the family name in them, for example there are hummingbird species that do not have hummingbird in the name. To see birds sorted by family you need to view them in the taxonomic mode.
Taxonomic Sort Mode - A taxonomic sort mode lists birds species essentially by their family name and in evolutionary order.
When you tap a family name the species appear underneath it, as shown here. This is a particularly educational way to view birds as you become aware of how they evolved historically.
Icon View - The default search view is by text but you can switch to a icon view as shown here. Icon view is helpful in that you might identify a bird without needing to visit its species page.
Auto-suggestions - You are most likely to know the name of the bird you are trying to find or identify and the auto-suggestion feature makes that easy. As you type into the search field the match list is whittled down to those birds that match your text. For example here we typed "gull" and the match list displayed the 27 birds in North America with Gull in their name.
Search by Shape - You might think that typing a birds name is the best way to identify it and you would be wrong. Instead you will get better results if you used the Shape filter. In this example we selected "gull-like" and Winged Explorer's search engine returned 99 birds that are shaped like a gull.
This includes families such as Terns, Petrels, etc and is a more exhaustive way to identify a species when you are not sure of the family.
Search by Size - While size is not everything, it certainly is a determining factor in identifying birds. The size filter allows you to filter birds by their length, as shown here we have selected "Very Small (3 - 5 inches)" and the search engine has narrowed to the 81 birds of North America that fit in that size range.
Filters Cascade - The filters of the search engine work together so that each uses the list of birds from the previous filter. In our previous example we choose the size filter and narrowed the match list to 81 birds. Now if we choose a second filter, such as "Yard" and select "Yes frequently" the search engine looks at the 81 birds that are very small and displays just those that are found often in a backyard, resulting in 10 matched birds.
Since this information is recorded in the History list you can go in at any time and change either filter to a new value and see its effect.
View by Icon - Now that you have narrowed the match list to 10 very small birds found in your backyard, you can switch to icon view and see if the bird you are trying to identify is on the list. If it is all you need to do is click on the icon and you are taken to its species page.
Once at the species page you can use the previous next buttons to move through the list of 10 birds and see if additional information helps you make an ID.
+ HISTORY (click for details)
HISTORY
Search History - Each time you do a search - which means selecting a filter and a value for it - the details get recorded in a History area, as shown here. For example if when you select the Location filter and select a value such as California, a "tile" is formed for it with its value listed and the number of birds that are matched. At any time you can tap on Edit and change the location or clear it from the search history
entirely.
The example here shows five filters used to identify the Black-headed Grosbeak.
PREFERENCES AND HELP
Preferences - You can change various settings in the preferences screen which is access via the Options menu. The settings allow you to turn interface clicks on and off, change the sound that is made when the search runs, enable, disable or change the startup sounds, turn the horizontal slider menus on or off (you may wish to turn them off when in the landscape mode), and enable or disable the scrolling of the mini navigation toolbar on the species page.
Built-in Help - Winged Explorer has extensive built in HTML help files which can be accessed from the Options menu.
This table lists devices that have been tested with Winged Explorer and are known to work. However Winged Explorer will work with any standard Pocket PC or mobile device which is based on the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform, has at least 48MB of free memory, a 240 x 320 pixel screen and an storage card slot. The Windows Mobile standard operating system must be version 5 Second Edition, version 6 and up. This list will be continually updated.
DEVICE
COMPATIBLE?
iPAQ 2495
Yes
iPAQ Classic 100
Yes
iPAQ rx 1950 (1)
Yes
HTC Touch
Yes
AT&T Tilt
Yes
Verizon XV6800
Yes
iPAQ 200
No
Dell Axim
No
Palm Treo
No
Note (1) Requires forced manual activation
Winged Explorer Software Download
SKU:
WBWE02-Software Download
Description:
Product is exactly the same as the packaged version except is downloaded from the Internet. The download is approximately 250MB so a broadband or DSL connection is recommended. An external SD Card reader must be available for copying the database from the PC to the SD card. You cannot copy the database over ActiveSync.
You must supply your own SD Card with at least 250MB of space.
Only compatible with Windows Mobile platform (known as the Pocket PC) version 5 Second Edition, 6 and up. Requires at least 48MB of memory, a 240 x 320 pixel display and a storage card. Not compatible with Blackberry or Palm.
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+ TABBED INTERFACE (click for details)
+ SPECIES PAGES (click for details)
+ LIFE LIST (click for details)
+ SEARCH (click for details)
+ HISTORY (click for details)
Winged Explorer Software Download
