Going to the special hell
I have definitely fallen off of the path of righteousness.
I've given up and picked up an iPod Touch. This is "necessitated" by the applications available on the iProducts, and no where else (yet).
One of the first things I determined is that one of the desired apps, BirdJam is not only an even more cool application than I had thought, but was an order of magnitude more expensive. It requires first the purchase of the data (separate birding apps, also usable outside of BirdJam) and then the purchase of a module to transform the data into ... er ... Jam? So, for US birds, the data is $20 each for Eastern and Western, or $30 for both combined, and the software to convert the data is $59 for each, or $99 for both. There are a number of add on modules for $9 (data) and $20-30 (conversion software) each.
In any case, I picked up the Audubon's Birds of North America app, which seems as good of the general field guides as any, and BirdsEye - a very cool app, which takes sightings reported to eBird, and maps them onto Google Maps, and lets you see where the sightings for a particular species have been seen recently.
I'll let you know how this all works out for me.
I've given up and picked up an iPod Touch. This is "necessitated" by the applications available on the iProducts, and no where else (yet).
One of the first things I determined is that one of the desired apps, BirdJam is not only an even more cool application than I had thought, but was an order of magnitude more expensive. It requires first the purchase of the data (separate birding apps, also usable outside of BirdJam) and then the purchase of a module to transform the data into ... er ... Jam? So, for US birds, the data is $20 each for Eastern and Western, or $30 for both combined, and the software to convert the data is $59 for each, or $99 for both. There are a number of add on modules for $9 (data) and $20-30 (conversion software) each.
In any case, I picked up the Audubon's Birds of North America app, which seems as good of the general field guides as any, and BirdsEye - a very cool app, which takes sightings reported to eBird, and maps them onto Google Maps, and lets you see where the sightings for a particular species have been seen recently.
I'll let you know how this all works out for me.