Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 07:55:31 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Rick Sussman Subject: Re: Bird Listing Software MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 4/30/2001 6:38:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, jferris33@HOTMAIL.COM writes: > The two products that I am currently considering are Thayer's "Birder's > Diary" and the Avisys product. > > Can anyone give me some advice on which product is better? Jim, Avisys is better! Having said that, I have to issue the disclaimer that I have never used Thayer software, so have nothing to compare Avisys to. I have however been using Avisys for over 10 years, and it really keeps getting easier to use with every update. I am now using 4.1 I think. It has the world list on it, which I seldom use, but it really is very easy to use. I have been keeping records of Montgomery County birds for at least 10 years, and having such a substantial database enabled me to write the calander of the birding year for the upcoming guide to birds in Montgomery County. I was able to pull all my sightings, month by month over ten years and see immediatly when each species came through in numbers. One caveat, though. When setting up the "places" section of the software, the manual suggests that you list parks that you bird frequently under counties. I would recommend putting them under cities instead. Doing it this way automatically records sightings in parks in the county in which they were seen. If you set up parks in the "county" section, you will only be recording sightings in the state in which they were found, and lose valuable county records. If this does not make sense, and you do purchase Avisys, contact me when you are doing your set-up, and I will advise again. It really is a great program... Rick Sussman Ashton,MD warblerick@aol.com ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================