This will be a series of wildlife identification applications for Google Android phones. It is expected that each app will be similar in operation and all will use our high quality original wildlife paintings.
The apps will cover common species and will be aimed at children and non specialist adults. With the low and still reducing prices for these devices (the Pulse Mini shown below was on sale for £19.99) these are now very suited to field studies for non-specialist teachers & pupils.
The first three in the series "iSee Land Bugs", "iSee Pond life" and "iSee Wild Flowers"; are available now at the Android Market priced at £3.
The photograph shows iSee Land Bugs running on a T-Mobile Pulse Mini. This is at the low end of the Android-powered phone market and has a 240 x 320 resolution.
The species images used are 320x320 pixels and resize to give acceptable quality on all phone screen sizes/resolutions.
All views operate in either portrait or landscape mode.
You can identify a creature from its appearance or select a species by viewing the thumbnails in alphabetical order.
There is also a full help page.
To identify a creature, answer 4 questions about its legs, wings, one main colour and size using the drop down boxes. If you are unsure a question can be left as "Don't Know" and the app will make its selections based on the questions you have answered.
When you press identify a text box briefly displays your selections.
All the species pictures are presented as thumbnails in the most likely order with exact matches first, then partial matches, then those that do not match any answer. A box marks the end of the exact matches if any.
Questions are weighted in order of reliability. The legs question, which identifies the generic group, has the highest weighting which means, for example, that the species with the right number of legs but wrong colour come before those with the wrong number of legs but right colour. Other rules provide better ordering and allow for variations between individuals, for example, species with a little of the colour selected appear before those with none.
Click a thumbnail to see the species picture. Scroll down for brief text details.
Information includes common name, Latin name, class, order, number of legs, wing arrangement, colour, size, UK distribution, what the adults eat and the number of similar species in the UK. There are also brief notes on the larvae when appropriate.
You can leave all questions as "Don't know" to view the above thumbnails in alphabetical order or you can use the separate species browser which has larger thumbnails with captions.
Operation is generally as iSee Land Bugs but, because there are very few species of fish or amphibians found in ponds, there is no identification process for these. Simply select either as the main type on the selection screen, above left, and those thumbnails will be presented first. Tap to view the species picture. If Invertebrate is chosen, the identification questions are presented as with iSee Land Bugs.
For a complete description and further illustrations see the Android Market
Operation is generally as iSee Land Bugs but, because of the huge variety of plant characteristics, the questions are necessarily harder to answer. Context sensitive help, with pictures, is therefore available from the device menu to guide the user. The help page shown above has a brief description and illustrations for each of the various leaf shapes. As with all iSee Apps, it is not necessary to answer every question and in some cases it may be simpler to just select petal colour and make a choice from the relevant thumbnails presented at the start of the database.
Most images, except when they are of sufficient size in the main picture, include separate details of the flower and leaf.
For a complete description and further illustrations see the Android Market