What's New

▶ 2 NEW SPECIES: The Winter Wren has been split into the Pacific and Winter Wren and the Whip-poor-will has been split into the Eastern Whip-poor-will and the rare Mexican Whip-poor-will. (Inclusion will depend on your region)

▶ MANY NEW SPECIES DRAWINGS.

▶ RENAMED ALL PHOTOS - This was a monster job. We wanted to make the photo titles more accurately reflect the bird in it, so we added a set of rules for the headline. Now you will see a consistent use of titles that tell you if it's an adult, juvenile, female, etc. If you see any mistakes please let us know.

▶ SAVE & LOAD SEARCH - Now you can save your selected search values and quickly load them later.

▶ CONFORMS TO ABA AND AOU STANDARDS – we are bringing iBird into conformity with the ABA and AOU standard for North America. As a fist step check out the splits of the Winter Wren and Whip-poor-will (depending on your region).

▶ TAXONOMIC ORDERING IN FAMILY MODE - We have made the ordering of the species in the Browse screen Taxonomic mode to be complete, e.g. before we had the families ordered correctly but the species within the Family were sorted alphabetically. Now they are sorted by taxon. You can still sort them alphabetically by Family by setting the Taxonomic switch to off.

▶ RETINA ICONS - Retina Icons. We have updated all our icons to be compatible with the retina display, meaning they no longer have any jaggies. In the process we updated a lot of the icons in the tab bar and on the More page. Thanks to the customers who hammered us on this detail we kept putting off.

▶ COLOR PROMINENT - This is a new attribute we are really proud of because of how effective it is for matching birds. The Color Prominent attribute is the answer to the question, "What color of the bird is most conspicuous?" It’s the color that stands out the most and is the most striking. Secondarily it may be the color that makes up the largest percentage of the bird's coloring. Try this attribute when you see a bird and let us know how much it helps you.

▶ HEAD PATTERN - Big, giant and huge update to the Head Pattern attribute. We have stressed in the Search tutorials how important the head of bird is to identifying it and none are more important than Head Pattern. We went back and fine tuned this attribute adding a new value called Eyebrow. We also made sure the Overviews reflected the values assigned to this attribute.

App Description

▶ 50% off summer sale of Version 6.0 of iBird Canada Guide to Birds. Regular $9.99 now only $4.99.

▶ Scientific American magazine recommends iBird in August 2012 issue, page 84!

▶ BUYER’S GUIDE TO BIRDING APPS – Compare before you buy: ibird.com/compare

As seen in Apple’s TV commercial “We have an app for that” iBird is the world’s best-selling birding app (http://ibird.com/itchy), which comes with a powerful decision engine for identifying any bird species in seconds. The latest update 6 adds features that will turn you into a birding expert. Here are just a few of the things we did to improve iBird.

▶FEATURES 686 SPECIES OF CANADA

▶ INCLUDES - AB, Aleutians, Baffin Island, BC, Ellesmere Island, NL, MB, NB, NS, NU, NT, ON, PE, QC, SK, YT

▶ 17 SEARCH ATTRIBUTES - search by color, shape, location, head and body patterns, flight style. Includes a new way to search by color, tutorials on how to use the search and definitions of every attribute.

▶ AUDIO - 3 hours of bird songs and calls from the gold standard; the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

▶ UNIQUE SPECTROGRAPHIC DISPLAY brings insight to the structure of bird songs by allowing you to view the sound's frequency components.

▶ CLOUD SYNC – Automatically syncs Favs, Notes and Settings to the Apple cloud.

▶ SAVE & LOAD SEARCH - Now you can save your selected search values and quickly load them later.

▶ CONFORMS TO ABA AND AOU STANDARDS – we are bringing iBird into conformity with the ABA and AOU standard for North America. As a first step check out the splits of the Winter Wren and Whip-poor-will (depending on your region).

▶ PHOTO CENTER - Photo Center is a gallery for storing and assigning your photos to specific species pages in iBird. It also allows you to share photos via Facebook, Twitter, or email them to friends.

▶ SLIDESHOW FOR ILLUSTRATIONS - Now you can watch not just photos but also illustrations in the slideshow with bird songs in the background. You can even pick the artist who drew them or restrict them to a particular family of birds.

AWARDS and ACCOLADES for iBird:

■ WINNER: 2011 BEST APP EVER AWARD FROM 148APPS.COM

■ MACWORLD'S "BEST REFERENCE APP 2009: 4 ½ out of 5 mice."

■ O'REILLY "BEST IPHONE BIRDWATCHING APP 2009"

Standard Features:

■ Parameter driven search lets you identify birds quickly, so you spend more time observing and less time reading.
■ Search by Shape, Size, Habitat, Color, Family, Length, Weight, Flight Pattern, Wingspan, and much more.
■ Taxonomic and Alphabetical Family sort options on Browse screen.
■ Hand-drawn full sized color illustrations, with perching and flight views.
■ Multiple professional photographs for each species showing sexes and seasons.
■ Multiple professionally recorded bird calls and songs for almost every species.
■ Shake your device while on a species page to automatically select a new species and play a random bird song.
■ Extensive identification, behavior, and habitat information.
■ Full color range maps.
■ Links to detailed Birdipedia pages and hundreds of Flickr photos for each bird (requires internet connection).
■ Bookmark birds as Favorites for fast access.
■ Use Favorites lists as life list, yard list, travel lists, etc.
■ Sync Favorites lists and Notes to your desktop for backup and editing.
■ Species, common, and family names in English, French, and Spanish (text is English).

As a standalone iPhone app, iBird does not require an Internet connection for access to the information in its database. This does mean that the application is large, so please be patient when downloading from iTunes.

App Changes

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