field guide framework overview

The Elaborately Tangled Field Guide Framework (or simply, Tangled) is a field guide content viewer application that reduces the cost of mobile field guide applications by removing the need for custom software development.  The results are localized and advanced mobile field guide applications that cost less than paperback field guides.  The framework will run on a variety of mobile devices equipped with SD cards: initial support will be for Android OS and Palm OS devices, followed by support for Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices.  When released, Tangled will be free to users as well as individuals or groups interested in creating their own field guides.  (The field guide multimedia can also be free if the multimedia owners consent or if the multimedia is in the public domain.)

The phrase elaborately tangled is a reference to a sentence in Charles Darwin's conclusion in The Origin of Species.

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

Tangled is capable of documenting any number of guide topics (e.g., birds of North America, flowers of North America) and their interdependencies, which are as tangled as the bank Darwin contemplated.

getting started

Tangled has not been released yet, but its design is quite similar to the universal field guide.  The no fuss approach to getting the universal field guide is purchasing the universal field guide multimedia on a 1-GByte SD card, which is one of the listed multimedia options.

However, fuss can be good.  In addition to saving money, an advantage of setting up your own SD card is that it puts you in control of your field guide content: if there is a multimedia update or a new field guide topic that interests you, you just copy it to your SD card and select the application's 'select/link' menu item.  The steps to setup your SD card are well documented (and help is available from the user group if you need it).

• Review the download and copy instructions, and the user manual.
• The guide consists of three components: application, topic text, and topic multimedia.  After installing the application, copy some topic text to your SD card by downloading the topic text and unzipping it to your SD card.
• Get some topic multimedia and copy it to your SD card.
• Link the application, topic text, and topic multimedia together by selecting the application's 'select/link' menu item.

user comments

• "The more I use your software the more excited I am to use it."
• "Much of my birding around home is by sound and this program is the best interface I've found yet for audio use. What an ultimate field guide." - user
• "[V]ery, very slick program!"
• "I got it working - and all I gotta say is WOW!!!! Very nice .... and for the price it is incredible!!!!"
• "It has been wonderful to create lists that I can then upload to eBird."
• "Thanks for this excellent program."
• "This is the bird guide I have been waiting for."
• "The more I use this little program, the more I like it."