J-Bird version 0.5.1 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 0.5.1 Release date: 21 June 2006 Version 0.5.1. There is no grand new feature in this release. Data stored by J-Bird were separated from the software so that J-Bird can be distributed as a native package on Mac OS X. Bug fixes and minor improvements: - When creating trips, the default region is the region of the most recently created trip, rather than the first region in the list. - If while ticking species that were seen on a trip you decided to export the checklist to an html file or to a csv file, undecipherable text was printed for presence/absence. Fixed. - Exported files on MS Windows computers now have traditional DOS/Windows end-of-line characters. - On Mac OS X if J-Bird attempted to open up a page in the user guide for which there was a space in the URL, it failed. Spaces in URLs are now replaced with appropriate characters. 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, J-Bird should move its data from the software directory to its new home when you launch it for the first time. It may take a moment, but it should work. If it does not, you may be able to find help in the the user guide appendix "Debugging problems after upgrading from J-Bird 0.5.0 or earlier" http://j-bird.sourceforge.net/uapdxd.html. KNOWN ISSUES AT TIME OF RELEASE: The following issue has not changed since J-Bird 0.5.1. If are upgrading from J-Bird 0.5.0 or earlier and if you compile J-Bird for yourself and run it using ant, just once you need to run the command "ant run-separate" after rebuilding J-Bird and before running it for the first time. That command separates your data from the software. 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.