Some time ago Santa Barbara considered the feasibility of entering sightings in the field on miniature devices using the Palm operating system, for subsequent transfer to BirdBase. But they concluded that it is not practical for the following reasons.
Serious birders want to record the circumstances in which a sighting is obtained. Also, for trips outside their usual birding territory they frequently must record field marks for later analysis to be sure they have properly identified the bird. Thus they need to include detailed notes with many or most of their sightings. But words are entered in Palm devices by writing their letters with a stylus on a region of the screen which is so small that they must be written one letter at a time. And they must be written very carefully in particular ways that for many letters are quite different from the ways they are normally written -- which is why they are called graffiti, not letters. This is difficult, time consuming, error prone, and therefore very distracting.
But the situation has changed dramatically with the recent introduction of equally miniature, and not very expensive, devices based on the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system. They remove the problem because with a Pocket PC a sighting note spoken into its built-in microphone is recorded on its memory chip and automatically attached to the sighting being entered.
We have developed software called the Pocket PC Add-On. It puts one or more of any of the BirdBase "short lists" in a Pocket PC as a document for the device's word processor, Pocket Word. To enter a sighting while in the field, the user finds the species in the document by applying the word processor's Find facility to its common or scientific name. Then several taps of a stylus put the sighting in the document. The user records a note for the sighting by speaking into the Pocket PC microphone. On returning from the field, the add-on software reads the document and enters its sightings into BirdBase. At the same time the user has the document open in the computer's word processor, Microsoft Word. When the software comes across a recorded note it indicates this to the user who, with only three mouse clicks, plays it back on the computer speaker and then types it (or an edited version) on the computer keyboard into BirdBase. The sighting notes are entered by the user with a keyboard while relaxed at home, not with Palm graffiti while under stress in the field.
After installing the Pocket PC Add-On in the BIRDS folder for use with BirdBase, you can install it in the MAMMALS folder for use with the Mammal Data Add-On described below. Furthermore, you can take a Pocket PC to some location loaded with lists of the birds and of the mammals which might be seen in that location, and then enter sightings in both lists. Switching from one list to another requires only two stylus taps.