App Review: Bird Codes

My birding blog friend Drew Weber over at NemesisBird.com and his brother James, created a very handy app for birders called Bird Codes. If you're like me, you occasionally see the four-letter banding codes used in birding listservs and you may not readily recognize them. At times, I just want to use some form of short-hand when listing the birds I am seeing. Most of the four-letter codes are easy enough to figure out, but some of them are confusing or the code creators had to get a little creative because of similar bird names. Anyway, our problems with four-letter codes are over now that we have Bird Codes for iOS devices for just $0.99 on iTunes.

The app itself is simple and thereby sublime. See the screen shot images in this post. No frills. Just exactly what you need in a perfectly intuitive interface. I appreciate how it has the smart typing feature of pulling up the list of bird names that match what you are typing. This helps eliminate the struggle that I have of remembering if the bird's name is hyphenated or not.

When the Weber brothers get rich because of this and other awesome birding apps, they may consider future enhancements, might I suggest adding the ability to enter a bird name to look-up by voice command? Perhaps include a list of the birds that you can scroll thru in taxonomic or alphabetic order. Maybe even add some sort of code-learning game to help us commit the codes to memory. But really, the app is perfectly good and user-friendly as-is. Great work guys!

Bird Codes Review by BirdingIsFun.com contributor Robert Ripma at NuttyBirder.com