Review of the birdcountr App for iPhone

 Let me start with a little background. I have been photographing birds for 3 years and have gotten somewhat serious about it recently after meeting a local birder on twitter. This has led to a near obsession to see, and then photograph as many birds as I can in our short migration season here in Alaska. Hence, I have been searching for an iPhone app that I could use to keep track of a life list. As an added bonus if I could keep track of lists in the field that would be even better. I did a google search but didn't have much luck and had given up on the idea when I came across an add on Facebook for the birdcountr app. After a little research this sounded like what I might be looking for so I bit the bullet and spent the $9.99 it cost. The following is a review of my experience with the app.

Let's start at the beginning. I have to be honest, upon loading the app for the first time I could barely contain my excitement! I couldn't wait to try this thing out!  So let's take a peak inside...

When you first load the app there is a big splash screen with 4 options. The largest button "Start a list" is self explanatory. The other 3 options, located in footer bar, are Menu, List Settings and Archive.

Menu

 The Menu has some cool features. The first and my personal favorite is "Customize Lists." This allows me to choose which of three lists I'd like to select birds from. The choices are Eastern, Western (both customizable) and Custom. The Custom list allows you to build your own customized list compiled of personally selected species in your birding area. Living in Alaska this is is a great feature. It takes a bit of time to set up but really speeds things up in the field as I no longer have to search through a bunch of irrelevant species as I add sightings to my list. 

The next menu item is "Set Running Count Mode" which allows you to either collect individual GPS coordinates or batch them. For me this comes into play when doing a birding sit (I use running count) when I am sitting in the same place for hours and only want to record the location of the area (which also speeds up the app) or doing a birding walk where I want to collect individual GPS data for each bird or set of birds I find.


Next we have "Manage Location Favorites" This app lets you store your favorite birding locations for easy recall later. In the manage menu you can add locations with or without GPS coordinates or delete previously entered favorites. I'd love to see a feature here that allows me to re-enter GPS coordinates but so far I haven't been able to find this option.


The next two items are "Set Email" and "Set Twitter Info." Set Email allows you to set up an email address to which you can send the list data end of your birding session. Twitter Info let's you  associate a twitter account. Thus far the only use for twitter is to send out a tweet when you find a rare species. Still a good use but I hope to see more integration later.

Next we have "Customize Family Photos" which allows you to set your favorite bird's photo as the avatar for that bird's family.

Finally, there is an option called "Photo Credits" which obviously allows you to see who took the photos used within the app. Of course I love this feature but unfortunately none of my photos are in it. :-(


List Settings
"List Settings" contains a few other options for customizing lists to your personal preferences. The first is simply to select which list the app is using. Eastern, Western or your Custom List.

The next allows you to choose between table and scroll lists (the names seem backwards to me). Scroll list shows pages of icons just like the app pages on your iPhone. The Table mode organizes the lists into a scrolling index. While Scroll mode certainly allows for faster navigation, I prefer Table mode simply because I find it hard to see the icons in the bright sunlight outdoors and the text in combination with the white background, makes it easier for me to see what I'm doing.

The next option allows you to either enable or disable Geotagginig Entries. The final option allows you to set the banding code you prefer to use. It can be set to either AOU or BBL.

Archive
The last button on the splash screen of the app allows you to view your archived lists either by day or by bird. This Bird archive does kinda serve as a sort of life list but not really.

Using the App
 Ok, on to the good stuff. Pressing Start a List brings up a google map and the GPS locates your current position. You can skip this or continue.You will then be asked to enter your location. You can either type in a new location or select the "From Favorites" button to choose one of your stored locations. Once you have begun you will be at the home page of the app. Here you will see a list of bird families. On the top is a Navigation bar and on the bottom is a quick menu bar.

The menu bar at the bottom allows you to edit your list, add a quick entry using bird banding codes, an option to view the current list as is, a search function that searches either by Band Code or search term and an End List button.

From here I find the app fairly easy to use and learn. To enter a sighting simply select the family, the species, the plumage type and number spotted and click save. For example lets say I see a pair of breeding Horned Grebes (a fairly common sighting this time of year in Fairbanks) and I want to record them. From the home menu, I'm going to select Grebes>Horned Grebe>Adult Breeding and then select 2 and save. I also have the option to add a note here or send an alert via twitter before saving.

Once I am finished with my birding session I can view the list, edit anything I might have hastily entered incorrectly and end the list. I can email it to myself using either plumage notes or just totals. I can then go to the archives and review any of my past lists.

Archived lists will tell me how many species I spotted that session, the start and end times of the session and give me a list of individual species and the numbers from the session. I can then reopen the list, email it to myself and if I allowed individual GPS coordinates to be collected I can even view a map that displays all locations of my encountered species or I can choose to view the locations of each species individually.

The Review
So now that we know how this app works and what it does let's get to the reality of how well it works.

Pros: This app really does do some cool things. I love the ability to keep track of things without having to bring along paper and a pencil. I always have my iPhone so even if I didn't intend to bird I can still keep track of my encounters if I choose.

I really like how intuitive it is once you get to the heart of the app. It didn't take me long at all to feel fairly proficient with it. I am Thrilled with the ability to customize my lists to suit my birding region. This is a key feature that I would like to see added to several other birding apps and field guides. Eliminating the need to browse through a barrage of species that don't live in my region really speeds up my listing. I also like that with the click of the "All" button at the top of the home page I can still have access to all the birds.

I also like that this app will collect dates, times and GPS coordinates of where I saw each bird so that as I continue this new addiction I can review the best times and places to find each bird. The archives are fantastic! I also enjoy the ability to go back and look at a map of the species I saw.

Finally, the developer has been in contact with me throughout my testing of this app and is impressively passionate about both birding and the success of this app. 

Cons: Initially this app was very unstable! I had a good deal of trouble getting the thing to stay loaded up. It actually crashed between 5-10 times on average per hour birding session. To be fair about this, Kevin Ripka, the developer, has said that the app does work much better on the 3Gs and I am using the 3G but that really didn't satisfy me. However, during the actual writing of this review, an update was released and I haven't been able to make the thing crash since installing it. Bravo!

Honestly, not having a life list frankly sucks! This was after all my original intention for buying this app. However, Kevin has also assured me this will be remedied in a future version. The data that this app collects is fantastic and far more than I can collect with a pen a paper but... I can certainly keep track with pen and paper much faster and all that data seems to go to waste as the only thing that can be exported is a simple list (This is addressed below). I would love to see some sort of spreadsheet data export so that this info can be plugged in to personal records.

Another issue I have been facing (which may be more related to the patchy AT&T service here in Alaska than to the app itself) is that the GPS sometimes isn't even in the ballpark. 

My biggest frustration with the app overall (which really isn't a fault of the app) is the need to leave it and restart iBird every time I want to ID a bird and then reload the app to record it.

Summary: 
All in all I feel this is a great app. birdcountr has been well thought out. It fills some of the gaps left by other similar apps. It is a bit cumbersome and slow but to be honest if I knew banding codes and could use the quick entry it would be fairly fast and much less hassle than pen and paper. Not to mention the smaller environmental impact and lack of messy papers. The lack of a life list is a huge bummer but will be addressed. Collecting all this data makes me want to be able to use it and in this first version it is a bit unexploited.

Despite the things it leaves me wanting for, it does get the job done. Kevin has some fantastic ideas for future releases and I look forward to watching the evolution of this app.

The bottom line:
Would I recommend this app to other birders? Absolutely! Especially advanced birders who have a good understanding of banding codes. After seeing where Kevin is going with this app I feel it's worth the money. Most of my concerns are already things Kevin has thought of and plans to address in future versions

Future versions will include: Life lists, the ability to export to ebird, export geoRSS or KML, the ability to browse archive by location, charts for seeing species frequency and plumage comparisons, add multiple custom lists, add a species/hybrid, and, of course, bug fixes as they are discovered. Kevin also plans a tutorial  about how to convert all this info into a blog post with an interactive googlemap embedded. Birding bloggers should already see the value in this.

This is a great app that should only get better!





Disclaimer: While I put a lot of passion and drive into learning anything I take an interest in, I am by no means a birding expert. I would at best claim to be an enthusiastic novice. 


Notice: It should also be noted that while actually writing this review an updated was released bringing the current version to 1.1 which I have not yet had time to test.