The Birder's Notebook Developer's Edition is the software that was used to produce the world's first truly
electronic Field Guide, The Land Birds of Southeast Brazil. It can be used to develop an infinite variety of
Multimedia Checklists or Field Guides and, once completed these can be distributed for others to use.
With The Developer's Edition you combine the text, pictures or videos, vocalizations and distribution maps for
each species into a single display page wherein each piece of information is quickly accessible in a format that
is much superior to a book (how many books show lifesize pictures and can play songs and videos?), and where information
on different species can be easily compared.
The Multimedia Checklist format is also superior to the many clumsy websites that people use to display pictures
and sometimes other information. A Multimedia Checklist developed using The Birder's Notebook can
consist almost entirely of Internet links and the species data can be accessed quickly,
information can be displayed rapidly, and information can be synthesized from multiple sources.
For instance there are websites with tens of thousands of pictures with thousands more coming each year - some of these are great pictures, many are plain junk -
who has the time to sift through them all? With a Multimedia Checklist the best can be selected and returned to
with a couple of clicks. In fact another of the great uses of The Birder's Notebook and its Multimedia Checklists
is as a sort of specialized web-browser.
If you just want to develop Multimedia Checklists for your own uses you don't need The Developer's Edition.
The Standard Edition contains all the functions required to develop as well as use Multimedia Checklists and you
can in fact even distribute Multimedia Checklists to other Birder's Notebook users. The Developer's Edition
does contain functions that make it much easier to setup a Multimedia Checklist, particularly if you want to
setup several and keep the information for each separate, but its main use is for those who want to develop complete
Multimedia Checklists or Field Guides and publish or distribute them to others. Included with
The Developer's Edition is the right to obtain from GG Software and use a special abbreviated version of
The Birder's Notebook that will just display the information contained in the particular Multimedia Checklist
(e.g. The Land Birds of Southeast Brazil).
Publication and distribution can be in two forms:
Via a CD or DVD medium (e.g. The Land Birds of Southeast Brazil)
Via the Internet - this is the preferred medium if the Multimedia Checklist and its associated
files are of reasonably limited size, e.g. if it only consists of text and pictures, or with just a
few songs and videos.
With Internet publication only the quite small module that runs the
software is sent initially to the user who, after a short trial period (a couple of days), then purchases
it. All of the other stuff, text, pictures, videos etc. is sent over the Internet as the user operates
the software and requests specific information. Once sent the information is retained on the
purchasers computer so that it can be instantly reaccessed but in a form where it is unreadable
by any other computer thus providing almost complete copyright protection in contrast the
virtually non-existent protections that currently exist for Internet material, (protections that are
daily being undermined by software producers such as Google). Many email accounts these days come with over
100MB of disc storage so that its possible to put at least half that much information into a publication at no
additional cost to the publisher and in a secure location.
Although at $300 per developer The Developer's Edition is expensive it is only necessary to buy it once and
you can develop and publish as many different Multimedia Checklists as you wish. GG Software will charge an additional
fee of $50 to provide each final publishable module (Master Disc for CD or DVDs, or Master Module
for Internet distribution). GG Software also reserves the right to charge a royalty on sales of any
product using its software that is distributed for profit.
For more information or to
purchase the Developer's Edition contact GG Software at:ggsoftware@att.net
