The Peterson Field Guide to Backyard Birds is an iPhone app that is described as “the first published field guide for birds created especially for the iPhone”. I should let on real quick here that I’m no bird expert (very far from it) or birdwatcher. I bought this app because my daughter loves keeping up with the variety of birds we’re lucky enough to have right outside our back door here in Texas – from large, majestic hawks to bluejays, cardinals, owls etc.
I thought this app would be a fun way for her to get to know more about any birds that caught her interest, and I definitely thought she’d love the recorded bird calls and songs included in the program. Turns out that that second point has been one of the very few bright spots in using this app, unfortunately.
I should also mention that I know next to nothing about the Peterson Field Guides series of books that this application is based on – if you’d like a look at what they’re all about see this page for details.
Read on for a rundown of some of the program’s key features, my thoughts on why this app is quite disappointing, and more screencaps. I’m going to refer to the program as ‘Backyard Birds’ from here on in this post, just for brevity (and lazy typing) sake …
Here are some of the main features of Backyard Birds (as stated on its App Store page):
- Peterson bird images with Peterson identification System arrows pointing to key field marks
- Peterson range maps
- Peterson’s descriptive text (including information on attracting specific birds to your backyard)
- Beautifully recorded birdsongs and calls
- Quizzes using the birdsongs and Peterson art to help you identify birds by both their songs and by sight
- Personal checklist so you can keep track of all the birds you have seen
- Filtering of the most popular birds by geographic area
Again, I’m not a ‘bird guy’ or a major enthusiast in this area, but that seems a decent list, though maybe a bit on the short side.
Backyard Birds has quite a basic looking interface. From its main screen, you can choose to do one of the following things: see a list of birds filtered by zip code (which has issues), browse the full list of birds, see your own checklisted (bookmarked) birds, try out the quizzes, or see the ‘About’ page (when it shows up, see below).
As you browse birds in the filtered or unfiltered lists, you can tap on any individual bird and go to a page where you can choose to hear its song / call, see a text entry offering general information about it (including size and what sort of food it likes), click on the map graphic to view its range (where its found in the US), and add it to your check-marked list.
You can also take little ten question quizzes, on which you can choose to have questions only based on identifying a bird song, or to have assorted questions.
That’s really about all there is to Backyard Birds. So lets move on to some views on the application …
What’s Good:
The images of birds are very good, very accurate looking drawings. I’m guessing this is perhaps one of the things the Peterson guides are generally known for.
The birdsongs and calls are cool, and a lot of fun for my daughter, just as I’d hoped. We’ve even tried (unsuccessfully so far) to lure ducks over to us using the Mallard and Wood Duck calls at a riverside restaurant’s back deck.
The information about each bird is fairly decent, though also fairly short.
What’s Not So Good:
It just doesn’t feel like very much has been done to make this a real iPhone app. That ‘created especially for the iPhone’ rings hollow to me – this app feels much more thrown together from existing materials to me. Some examples of why I say this – you cannot double-tap to zoom in or out on any of the bird images (you have to two-finger pinch), there’s no use of landscape view, nothing that feels much like ‘oh yeah, using the iPhone’s capabilities’.
Navigation in the app is poor. Basically as soon as you go to any of its sections and sub-sections, your only route back to the main screen is pressing a ‘Back’ button at the top left of the screen – multiple times if you are a few steps into the app. There should be a ‘Home’ button, or some other more clever means of navigating within the program.
Performance is weak too. The responsiveness of the ‘Back’ button (your only means of navigation) is erratic; it often takes 3-4 taps to get it to work. My (five year old) daughter is already a bit of an iPhone vet, and she just quits the app when it fails to respond reasonably. I’ve also found that the app often just fails to display what it is supposed to. For instance, here’s an ‘About’ page to give us some background on the program:
And the information page for a Mallard duck:
Worst of all, it’s unstable as heck! A cardinal sin (no pun initially intended, but now I like it) for any iPhone app. Our first two versions of the app both had major crashing issues – it would let you launch it 3-4 times, then on subsequent attempts it would get to the splashscreen and bomb back to the desktop. This appears to have been resolved in its latest (1.1.2) version.
Even in its latest version though, it is prone to hanging up – and when it does it takes the iPhone down with it – refusing to exit gracefully and locking up badly enough that you get no response even when trying to force quit, and you’re forced to reboot the phone. In fact, it’s done this once today while drafting this post and attempting to remind myself of how one particular screen looked.
All of the above issues have occurred consistently on both a 2G (old school) iPhone and my 3G.
Overall:
In its current state, this is not an impressive application, and certainly not one which justifies a $4.99 price tag in my view. Its low production values, poor performance, lack of any high degree of customization for the iPhone, and instability nullify any and all of its positive attributes right now. Hopefully we will see (major) future updates (a price drop wouldn’t hurt either).
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TAGS: iphone apps
