The visual map that expands to short descriptions with the sounds, gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta.
Is there anything as fun and interactive that is available today that could be used by kids? Wikipedia is great for adults but it’s just too much information and it’s not packaged in short and visual focus of Microsoft Encarta of the old times. The other cool thing of MS Encarta is it wasn’t too big, it was finite, you could exhaust one topic and then go explore something else, it wasn’t infinite rabbit hole.
Microsoft had a lot of CD sets back in the day when there was bit of wonder that you could have all this stuff on your local computer. There was a lot of things related to music, maybe natural history, etc.
Highly highly recommend. I use it at least once a week and have done so for several years. My daughter loves scrolling through all the local birds and playing the sounds they make.
The sound and visual recognition around a lot of things is pretty impressive and I imagine it will work its way into less obstrusive AR in a lot of ways over time.
It's Pokemon for old people, I love it and use it at least once a day. Personal best for a dog walk - 23 different birds, personal best for sitting in the garden drinking my morning coffee - 17 birds.
My family got a little tired of me using it on holiday in Portugal, but in my defence there were a lot of new birds I needed to add to my collection.
Nice! I haven't tried Merlin, but I been meaning to set it up in the yard.
I've been using Seek on my phone, which is part of inatural. Similar thing, but pictures and most life, not just birds. That is totally Pokemon for non-pokemon peeps.. gotta bust out my phone every time I find something I haven't 'caught' yet.
Neat concept but looks vibecoded/authored by someone who does not know web programming. Many HTML and JS errors. Code is a mess. jQuery, angular, document.write, modernizr. Why?
Could be done at 5% of codebase size, with cleaner code, no var, better error handling ($http calls use .success(...), no zero .error()/.catch() handlers).
The description of Gallus Gallus ("Red Junglefowl" but also described as the "original chicken") mentions it being an introduced species in Hawaii (but also that it's interbred with "feral and domestic chickens" so it's hard to identify specifically.)
There are plenty of semi-wild and semi-domesticated chickens in the Caribbean and Florida. I still want to eat the rooster who woke me up from a great dream at 3am.
Is there anything as fun and interactive that is available today that could be used by kids? Wikipedia is great for adults but it’s just too much information and it’s not packaged in short and visual focus of Microsoft Encarta of the old times. The other cool thing of MS Encarta is it wasn’t too big, it was finite, you could exhaust one topic and then go explore something else, it wasn’t infinite rabbit hole.
Those were the days !
A bit like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? which used to ship with a physical almanac alongside the game disks.
I wrote about it last year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...
My family got a little tired of me using it on holiday in Portugal, but in my defence there were a lot of new birds I needed to add to my collection.
I've been using Seek on my phone, which is part of inatural. Similar thing, but pictures and most life, not just birds. That is totally Pokemon for non-pokemon peeps.. gotta bust out my phone every time I find something I haven't 'caught' yet.
Could be done at 5% of codebase size, with cleaner code, no var, better error handling ($http calls use .success(...), no zero .error()/.catch() handlers).