WildObs Mobile 1.1 for Android now supports Android 1.5 to Android 2.0 and beyond.

Here is a brief overview of WildObs Mobile including how to use WildObs Mobile for Android to:

• Browse community wildlife encounters (featured, most popular and recent.)
• Perform a species look-up by name or partial name, viewing photographs and other encounters.

Find out more about WildObs Mobile for Android or (if you are on an Android device) go to the market:

There have been a number of requests to for importing photographs previously uploaded to Flickr into WildObs, for use in describing a wildlife encounter. In short the process is:

• Go to your wildobs photograph gallery from your home page, and use the Flickr tab.
• Allow WildObs to connect to Flickr, authorizing it (typically once only) if needed.
• Select the photograph or photographs you wish to import.
• Create new wildlife encounters from one or more of these photographs.

Here is a simple how-to video on how to use this new feature. All feedback is welcomed.

View the wildlife that other observers are seeing around you. Knowing what to look for is half the challenge, and anticipation is much of the fun:

Want access to your wildlife encounters when you are out an about? Want to know what you saw the last time you visited this park, beach, or location? Want to know what others have been seeing that isn’t on your life-list? If so, then WildObs Naturalist (the latest member of the WildObs family of wildlife applications) is for you.

WildObs Naturalist ... find your nature

View your recent, local and popular encounters (or encounters by tag):

WildObs Naturalist: Your encounters

Review your wildlife life-list:

Check your species life-list

See what others have seen close to where you are that is not on your life-list, then find out where to find those species locally:

WildObs Naturalist - Local species not on your Lifelist

WildObs Lookout is the latest iphone application to join the WildObs family of wildlife iphone applications. Lookout allows you to find nature around you (to “keep a lookout”) and get some ideas of what wildlife you could experience. Let crowd-sourcing help you get away from the crowds and experiencing nature…

Are you visiting a park for the first time, are you looking for something new around you? Do you have an itch to experience something new? Let the many amazing wildlife observers in the wildobs community lead you to nature. See what others are seeing, and tune in to the wildlife around you:

• Lookout is location based, it shows you encounters around where you are.
• Dive into each encounter:
  • Map the encounters, include your current location, launch Google maps for driving directions.
  • Expand photographs for greater detail.
  • Explore the species (locally, on wildobs and on the Internet w/ NWF.org and Wikipedia.)
  • Find more local encounters for the species.
• Browse community encounters:
  • Recent encounters from the wildobs time-line.
  • Features encounters (great stories, images or otherwise special critters/encounters.)
  • Popular encounters (voted on by the WildObs community.)

• View encounters for species from your “favorite species” list.
• View encounters for species from your “wish-list species” list.
• Comment on observer encounters within the community.

WildObs Lookout 1.0

Find your nature…

Lookout for nature...

Dig into each encounter:

View the encounter

Map any set of encounters (local or wide spread):

Map wildlife encounters

Get you wildlife from WildObs on your Android phone. WildObs Mobile (the first WildObs application for Android operating system) allows you to:

• View community wildlife encounters:
  • Recent encounters (the community time-line.)
  • Features encounters (great stories, images or otherwise special critters/encounters.)
  • Popular encounters (voted by the community.)
• Do a species look-up by name, partial name and/or alias.
• Check out places for wildlife; parks/neighborhoods.

This free application is available on the Android Market:

Browse encounters, and select from the menu.

WildObs Mobile for Android

Perform a species look-up.

WildObs Mobile Species Search for Android

‘Tagging’ the act of putting keywords onto something is such a strange sounding/feeling task, but one we are increasingly used to with blogs, sites like Flickr, and here at WildObs. Tagging is flexible in that there is no set way to tag something, you get to chose. In that power is some complexity.

Tagging an encounter allows you to group a number of (perhaps otherwise unrelated) encounters together. It is best to try to tag encounters as you record them, while the encounter memory is vivid/fresh in your mind.

Here are some ideas on how you could implement tags:

• Some fun tags: cool, scary, ugly-yet-cute, out-of-place
• When on a wildobsing trip group encounters with tags: yellowstone2009, ak-10-09
• Perhaps set personal tags: goal-2009
• Or use community ones: id-request, out-of-place, first-of-season

Some folks say “keep a short list of tags you use frequently/consistently” and “avoid adding the first 20 things that come to your mind” and adding to that others say “it is better to combine a lot of simple tags than dream up complicated ones”. I would add … try to avoid putting the location or date/time or species name (although latin is always fun into tags since those are already captured in the wildobs system.

Default Tags setting

In version 1.1 of WildObs Lookup (and note, only WildObs 1.0 is in the App Store at time of writing)

Map the closest encounters for this species

That will provide a map of the closest encounter reports for that species in the WildObs database.

Map of closest encounters for a species

Lookup wildlife species.

Perhaps you are on a road trip out west and want to know if you are seeing a Wolf or a Coyote, a Moose or an Elk, a Goat or a Sheep. Or, conversely you are east of the Rocky Mountains coast and want to know what that glorious red bird is when the locals tell you it is a Cardinal?

Cannot quite remember the name of that bird, but know it is some ‘hummer’ thing, or some ‘blue’ thing? Or, you just want to be able to reference species on demand.

WildObs Lookup make these species and many more available to you on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Perform a lookup of a full or partial name to get a list of all WildObs species that match, including any WildObs known aliases (e.g. cougar for mountain lion.)

See Also

WildObs Lookup also tells you a list of “see also” species, if you lookup a Wolf it’ll suggest you “see also” a Coyote.

Observer Photographs

WildObs Lookup also allows you to view WildObs observer images (perhaps your own, or from others) for the species allowing you to get a variety of different samples to make a more positive identification.

Available in the iPhone App Store

WildObs Lookup is available in the iPhone App Store.

The list-based species selector (with birds, mammal, etc.) was intended to simplify lookup, and speed things up when focus ought be spent on the critter ahead. Unfortunately as the lists have each grown with new species, and the number of custom lists (such as favorites, recent, local) remains low, there are still times when lookups are hard. As such a “work in progress” feature was added to WildObs Observer 1.4 to allow a lookup based upon a few characters typed.

Note: This feature is also incredibly useful for when looking up (say) a “goldfinch” but WildObs has it listed as either an “American Goldfinch” or an “European Goldfinch”, neither under “G”.

Go to the standard iPhone Settings app to access “Observer” settings. Scroll down to the bottom for this one:

How to turn on work-in-progress features...

Then, next time you start WildObs Observer you’ll notice a “search icon” on the toolbar:

Notice the search icon on the toolbar...

Pressing the search (or filter) icon will allow you to reduce the number of items in a list with jsut a few characters typed.

Search/Filter into a species list with a few characters...

There are a few things to work out with this mechanism (including does it move across lists, e.g. if selecting ‘gold’ when on birds and move to mammals does it reset of remain) but it is available. Please do provide us with feedback on how this works for you.

P.S. Also, even without this new “work in progress” feature there already is species search in the species tab:

Species search exist also.