I’m currently working the field so maybe some day soon this will float to the top of our R&D pile and get spat out as a labs project.

More recently, things have moved on. It’s actually over a decade since we had MongoMusic, for those of you who remember it, which tried to recognise tunes that you sang or whistled, and came back with a Sounds Like.

Better cameras, more storage capacity, faster processing and easier cloud access all mean that we’re in a better place today. DE, I guess there’s a pedant in you that takes what I say literally.

In the past several years I’ve bought several paperback bird books in hopes of identifying a bird I knew as a youth in the highlands of West Texas. Nothing rare, but ID’ing the species always alluded me. And the books are always organized in ways that don’t make the task any easier. iBird solves that by way of the search function – search by location, shape, size, habitat, color, bill shape, flight pattern, and several other features. This is much more efficient than any taxonomy of a physical book. With this application you’ll identify the bird before it flies away. Unfortunately the first iteration iBird Yard didn’t have the bird I sought, either.

When I spotted iBird Explorer was out and had more birds cataloged, I forked out the extra cash for it and am very pleased to have identified the little running plover in the grass as a killdeer. I narrowed the search using the features mentioned and finally positively identified it by the sound. No book will ever do that.

More importantly, this “bird book” will always be in my front pocket. It will be there at the ready, along with my GPS unit, alarm clock, cooking timer, four twitter clients, Kindle reader, banking app, games galore, music tuning device, recipe book, Bloom generative music machine, chess computer, radio, iPod, four-track recording device, remote control, a copy of Das Urteil (and countless other books), calculator, electronic stylophone, digital leveling device, deck of cards, note pad, shopping list, weather device, tv, movie listing, and thousand of newspapers and books at the ready for downloading. Any time. Any place. All this in my pocket. It’s truly astounding all the devices this one little gadget has replaced in our lives. And the story is just beginning.

Imagine what f/w 3.0 will bring with the peripherals that will be possible.

This brings me back to this topic: I was just describing such an iPhone application with a colleague two days ago – thinking about how handy it would be to have an attachable yet slim Mophie-like battery pack with built-in scanning device and maybe front-facing camera. Suggesting how an external scanner could scan leaf-patterns or like the Amazon Remembers app, take pictures of plants and ID them on the spot. How handy would that be in a foreign grocery store or where the labels are simply misplaced on an exotic fruit in the corner market? Better yet, as a frequent back-packer I would love to ID plants on the trail and know quickly whether edible or not, medicinal uses, etc. This would be a great supplement to the bird book.

Separate from that though, what you envisage will probably come about within the decade just from brute force computing and good old crowd sourcing – “I know thats a birch because the last idiot to stand there pointed his iPhone at exactly the same tree”

BTW Martin, when I say “point. click. get the answer” I mean I do with with the detail available for me to delve into.

My dad is a great bird spotter and he suggests doing some volunteering with the National Trust or one of the local woodland management charities as a good way to learn more about local flora & fauna.