J-Bird version 0.5.0 is a record keeping program for birders. It is Copyright (C) 2001-2006 by Dick Repasky . This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License below for more details. Read the documentation at http://j-bird.sourceforge.net/ before installing. Upgrading from an older version? Be sure to read the release notes below or at http://j-bird.sourceforge.net/release-notes before upgrading. Briefly, you need to have either a Java runtime or development kit installed before you can install J-Bird. Once you have installed the package, you'll need to build a database before actually running J-Bird. Again, read the docs at http://j-bird.sourceforge.net/ before installing. Enjoy! ------------------------ Release notes for J-Bird 0.5.0 Release date: 16 February 2006 Version 0.5.0. Sightings can be imported from files of comma-separated values, Excel spreadsheets, tables in web pages, dBase files and relational databases. - To import sightings into a single trip, either select "import" when you create the trip, or select the trip on the tree of trips, right-click (ctl-click on Mac) and select "import". - To import sightings for many trips, press the "import trips and ticks" button on the task "create/edit trips and ticks". - See the user guide for details. There are many details. Bug fixes and minor improvements: - The tree of trips and tree of checklists are now well behaved. It used to be that if a new trip or checklist was added you would have to click on the branch twice to get anything to happen. Also, the underlying problem was effectively a memory leak. - Improvements have been made to HTML tables exported from displayed checklists and trip lists. Values are centered, and Y/blank rather than true/false. The HTML tables have borders. - Extraneous HTML tags have been removed from HTML tables that are exported from displayed checklists and trip lists. - On MS Windows, an error in java classpath prevented imports of checklists from Excel spreadsheets. Windows XP users: it is strongly recommended that you use Java Virtual machine version 1.5.0 or 1.4.2_09 or newer. HAZARDS FOR UPGRADERS If you are upgrading from a version of J-Bird that is older than version 0.4.0, please run J-Bird one last time before the upgrade and use the File menu to dump the database to files of comma-separated values (CSV). KNOWN ISSUES AT TIME OF RELEASE: The following issue has not changed since J-Bird 0.4.4. On some Linux window managers (fluxbox 0.9.12 or less but not Gnome, KDE or Xfce), the Windows menu fails to bring dialogs other than the J-Bird log to the front. The following issue has not changed since J-Bird 0.4.1. MS Windows users who use shortcuts to launch J-Bird will need to rebuild their shortcuts after upgrading from any version that is 0.4.0 or older. The easy way to rebuild is to double-click on the CreateIcons program in the J-Bird directory. Instructions for manually creating shortcuts are in the user's guide http://j-bird.sourceforge.net/uupgrade.html#below. The following issue has not changed since J-Bird 0.4.1. If you compile J-Bird from source code and run it yourself, you need to do some extra work before running J-Bird after upgrading from version 0.4.0 or earlier. Briefly, the database schema has been modified, and the Mckoi database engine has been upgraded. Details and instructions are available in the Changelog and in the hacking web page. The following issue has not changed since J-Bird 0.4.0. Mac OS X users: an inconsequential exception occurs if you have the option of selecting a checklist from which to tick species and accept the default without clicking in the chooser from which you can select a checklist. Why the exception occurs is somewhat mysterious. It does not occur on Linux and Windows. Again, the exception is inconsequential (because it occurs in the tree that you have dismissed). HAZARDS FOR UPGRADERS FROM VERSIONS 0.1.2 OR EARLIER (no change here since release 0.1.3): The code in J-Bird that generates files of comma-separated values (CSV) was changed in version 0.1.3 to make the CSV files produced and read by J-Bird conform with those produced and read by Microsoft Excel. A bug was also fixed. The bug should affect you only if you dumped your tables to CSV files and if there was in the interior of some text (region name, locality, keywords, or notes) a double quotation mark followed by a comma (e.g., Hey, "Dude", how's it going?). The effect of the bug is that J-Bird will misread data from CSV files that were dumped by any version older than 0.1.3 if the data contain within a field a quotation mark followed by a comma. If you keep "backups" of your data by dumping all database tables to CSV files using the File menu, be sure to dump all tables to CSV immediately after upgrading to be sure that your dumped CSV files are without the old bug.