Sorry, I posted this in the Handheld forum but meant to post it here:

My two cents (and that's probably all it's worth): Only corporate types care about Windows Mobile. The platform seems completely dead in the water. It's clunky, ugly, and deserves to die. Palm OS is also dead, especially since Palm is not supporting it any longer. There are only two (and perhaps three) contenders at this point: Google's Android platform and Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch platform (and perhaps the Palm webOS platform). I am not a programmer, but my understanding is that both Android and Palm are built on a Linux kernel (but with different proprietary extensions), whereas Apple's iPhone OS is not. Personally, I use an iPhone and would buy an BD iPhone app should one become available.

Resurecting an old topic, here. Whatever happened to the mobile version of Birder's Diary? I have an Android device, and I found an app called blueBill that does just about everything I would want, except it doesn't import into Birder's Diary.  In fact, it doesn't import into anything. So I would need to re-enter all of my sightings twice. It would be great to have a Birder's Diary mobile version that could handle this basic need.

Thanks for the interest here.

Developing for the mobile market is a constantly evolving and moving target. A couple folks have signed-on to do this, but fall short of producing a final product.

In terms of my ability to do it myself, time is the main issue. Learning a new technology, a different one for each platform and so on.

I would love to have one or more mobile versions of BD. Perhaps I can give that more attention soon.

Keep bugging...

I wasn't certain if it would be better to start a new topic or simply post this question here. Your response makes me anxious to find an alternative solution. In my last post, I mentioned that I use BlueBill on my Android phone. I also mentioned that it didn't have any export capability. That is not correct. I discovered that I can email my sightings list to myself, and include a file attachment. Here is the problem. The file is in KML format, which is an XML format that is used by Google Maps, etc, for importing place information. So, yeah, it has GPS coordinates in it. But the rest of it is information I would like to get imported to Birder's Diary. Any chance on adding support for this file type to the sightings import function? I can send you a sample file if you are curious, and a quick Google search yielded a lot of hits on the format, including documentation by Google. The data collected in this file is only a small subset of the data that BD collects, so I would think it would be pretty easy to add support for this file type. If not, can you tell me where to find the documentation of the file format that you do support for import, and I will write a conversion utility to get it in the correct format.

By the way, BlueBill is open source.

Hi Bill,

Great info. In that case we are almost there.

As you may or may not know, BD has a sightings import feature. You just have to convert any format you currently have, from any tool (e.g. BlueBill's XML export) to BD's CSV import format. It is documented here.

It should be quite simple to write such a conversion utility with a number of technologies. I would not be able to give this my attention for several weeks with v3.7 just coming out.

Also, after creating the BD import file, be sure to use the new 3.7 "Common Name" option on the import window.

Let me know if I can assist or answer questions in any way in the meantime.

Jeff