Recording program --- freeware

Hi,

As people will have seen I record my sightings using a program which adds time and place to make things easy.  The program is in tcl/tk and can in theory be run on most platforms.  I run it on a Microsoft PDA.

Now you probably have to have some skills to take my source code file and to run it, but its actually not too bad.  It is all free of course.  Get the tcl/tk runtime, start it, and with the command 'source' run the source file given below.  It uses one other file which is a text file of your chosen ordered list of birds. I give an example below.

I use a touch sensitive screen with a stylus, but you can run it totally with a directional-pad or joystick.

You can

- add dynamically species to the list
- search the list of records with regular expressions
- run commands in tcl directly
- use a clock system to get the direction of the observation
- record a distance to the bird
- add information about gender, age and behaviour
- add comments to a record
- the order of the list can be statically fixed by the user.  I concatenate two lists, each in alphabetic order.  One is for common species, and the other for irregular species.  This makes for much faster input.  I have a summer file and a winter file, of course
- converts to national grid.  Very messy code.
- output to a CSV file on memory card, and a back up file on the main device, should your pda crash.  Yes, windows mobile does have the odd crash.


which is pretty good since you do not leave the one static page.

here are the two files.

please consider that the code is under the gpl license.

click to download the tcl program

click to see the source code

click to see the list of birds and to download it

martin