We issued Specify 6.1.04 last night to fix a few recent issues, including the MAC OS database update problem. Registered users will automatically discover the update on Specify startup, other installations should use the Specify "Check for Updates" menu to download and run the updater. Many thanks to our clients who helped identify and diagnose these bugs.
Specify 6.1.04 Resolved Issues:
Specify 6.1.02 released last week had a defect which affected an embedded Specify database schema upgrade. Users would see a message like this when trying to update to 6.1.02: "This version of Specify '6.1.00' doesn't match the application version in the database '6.1.02'. You should upgrade the database to a newer version." The upgrade would then stop. Specify programmers are contrite for the exception which resulted from overzealous checking of version numbers.
The Specify Software Project has created 'Specify Labs', an area on the web site dedicated to illustrating new technologies and capabilities we are exploring. The "Specify Labs" is linked off a menu item on lower left of this page.
Specify Droid
We recently prototyped a version of Specify for mobile phones. Specify Droid would run on any Android (Google) operating system phone and enable custom phone display layout, data form customization, database lookups, and uploading to data repositories.
The Specify Team is ebullient to announce a new Specify WorkBench, the new Specify EZDB and a Specify Update Release.
Specify Mobile WorkBench
Specify EZDB and Specify Mobile WorkBench
Since the release of Specify 6.1 on October 30, our software engineers have been working diligently to finalize two new applications: Specify EZDB and Specify Mobile WorkBench. We had hoped to ship those last week but we noticed a few issues so we have been cycling through successive internal releases and testing. There are introductory guides for the two products on the Documentation page which illustrate some usage scenarios, explain benefits and capabilities.
Helpdesk Support Update
The Specify Software Project is delighted to announce Specify 6.1, a major update. Specify 6.1 supports the Global Biodiversity Information Facility's Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT). The IPT creates an HTML web site and XML/TAPIR publishing of your collection's data. It is an open-source, Java web application designed to publish biodiversity data on the Internet. See http://ipt.gbif.org for additional information on IPT.
This week the Specify Project will suspend its technical support services, including data migration to Specify 6, form customization and help desk support, due to a hiatus in funding. For the indefinite future, we will not respond to e-mail sent to the Specify help desk or calls to our support phone line.
Today we released Specify 6.0.10 which addresses two dozen issues from various places within the application. Thanks to Specify users and testers for revealing opportunities to improve Specify. With 6.0.10 published, registered Specify installations will automatically receive the update, and everyone else can get the new version from the Update menu within Specify or from the Download page on this web site.
We released Specify 6.0.9 on July 15th; it addresses a handful of issues. The list of bugs fixed is included in the Release Notes inside the update installer and it is appended below. Our labor continues on Specify 6.1 which will include integration with the GBIF Internet Publishing Toolkit "IPT" for HTML and TAPIR data publishing, among other features. Specify 5 sites ready to convert to Specify 6 should join our conversion queue, email to specify@ku.edu for a consultation on how to get started.
Specify Project staff are mostly back from summer vacation and we are preparing and testing our next incremental release, Specify 6.0.8. We are also working on the development of Specify 6.1, which will be our first major update since Specify 6 was released in April 2009. Specify 6.1 will ship with the GBIF Internet Publishing Toolkit (IPT) for easy creation of an HTML web site and a TAPIR XML data provider to serve Specify data to collection community portals. Engineering is finishing a new user interface for mapping Specify data elements to Darwin Core or any other desired schema.
