British Beetles - "Slideshow"

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SteveMcBill
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Joined: Thu Jul 31, 2008 9:15 am
Location: Runcorn, Cheshire
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British Beetles - "Slideshow"

Post by SteveMcBill »

British Beetles - "Slideshow":

I've uploaded an application I have created which is basically a slideshow with pictures of a large number of British beetle species.

The link is : https://www.adrive.com/public/t3hsZj/Be ... deshow.exe

This is not yet finished, but I hope that some people will download it and give me some feedback before I put more effort into it. Please note, this is about 200mb, so is a fairly large download. It can't be compressed any further, a zip file was bigger than the original! It's just a straightforward exe file which you should be able to run on your PC if you download it onto your desktop or wherever.

Essentially, this is intended to be an aid to beginners to learn to recognise beetles and beetle families. You can either go though the whole thing, in taxonomic order, or select specific families. Within each family, you can just move backwards and forwards. I may be able to add more navigation possibilities later.

There are numerous photos missing and still to be added, so please don't send me a list of pages with missing photos! Most of the more distinctive species are already included, most of the missing ones are actually common species for which I am preparing nice, fresh, clean specimens to get better photos.

I'm particularly interested to know how well it runs on different machines. One limitation is that it has to be a fixed size/resolution and so I've kept it down to 800 x 600 pixels so it should be OK on even a small laptop screen. However, it does mean that it looks quite small on a large screen. Any comments on this are welcome.

I also hope that some of the less experienced people who want to learn more about beetles will provide feedback on how useful this actually is. However, there is no point in asking for text, keys etc. This slideshow will eventually form a very small part of my long-promised CD "Guide to British Beetles" and that will obviously be much more complete and comprehensive. In the meantime, I'll complete the slideshow and make it available to the public domain if feedback is positive. In effect, I see this as a bit like Harde and Hammond's Field guide (without the text) which I spent many hours perusing before I knew much about beetles, as a result of which I later found I could recognise many families, and quite a few species, without having to count tarsal segments etc. ................

All comments welcome.

Richard Wright
richardwrightuk@yahoo.co.uk

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