Wednesday, January 21st
Our January meeting will feature the club's annual Photo Contest, and Board Elections.
If you'd like to enter the contest, simply come to the meeting with a photo of a reptile or amphibian that YOU have taken. You can enter as many as you'd like. Winners will receive a year's membership.
Meetings start promptly at 8pm in the Alumni Room of Medaille College.
Herp Care Software Version 1.1 Review
If you talk to any experienced herper or your herp vet they will tell you that having excellent records of your animals will help you detect illness and other issues with your animal early which can help save its life. I was out surfing the internet one day just searching for some basic information and personal research when I stumbled upon this great piece of free software from The Gecko Cam that will help both the novice and experienced herper help keep their records organized.
When you first open the software you are greeted with a nice friendly screen giving you the options Manage your Herps, Manage your Enclosures, or access your Library. The interface is simple and clean but this reviewer did not like the fact that this window could not be moved or resized on the screen. This should not be considered anything more than a minor annoyance though, since once you access the different modules you get normal style windows again.
Manage your Herps
The Manage you Herps section allows you to enter all of your vital information about your herp including the color morph, DOB/DOH and even a CITES number. There are options to track feedings, weight, length and a place to put a picture on your herp.
The weight and height options lets you maintain historical records to track your herp's growth or see if your herp is gaining or loosing a substantial amount of weight. The main Manage your Herp screen will display the latest weight and length data that you have entered.
you can also keep records of other important data such as feeding, shedding, breeding and illness from the icons at the top. In each of these sections you have the ability to export the data to Microsoft Excel if you want to do more sophisticated number crunching or just need to share your data with others.
There is a feature to allow you to print a report on your animal which includes a feeding table to see at a glance when and what your herp has eaten as well as providing excellent information about length and weight including the minimum and maximum weights for the animal. I love the report that is generated and it looks great and would be a great item to give to your customers with the sale of your animals so they have good historical records of their new animal.
I am a bit disappointed with the interface for printing. You have no control over which printer you can choose to print to or to the standard Windows printer dialog box. It will print to the default printer and that is it. If you have more than one printer or are using a network and would like to select which printer to use you are out of luck unless you redefine your Windows default printer. For the majority of home users this will probably not be a large issue and should not prevent you from using the software.
Manage your Enclosures
This is a nice feature that lets your keep records for your enclosures. It has features to track what substrate you are using and the size of your enclosures that you use. You can also keep track of temperature, humidity and cleaning schedules.
It has an option to show occupants which should be linked with the Manage you Herps section though it appears to not be implemented in this version. It is however fixed in the latest beta release (Version 1.2 beta release 3) that I tested.
The printed report is just as fabulous as in the Manage your Herps module though it suffers from the same problems that I described earlier.
Library
I like the idea of this feature. It lets you collect care sheets from various sources and will even keep track of such information as when published and the Link (internet address) where you collected the information. This way you can easily keep several care sheets for each species in one place.
There is also a nice feature that allows you to e-mail the care article to a friend. This can be very useful for breeders who want to zap off a care guide to a customer via e-mail.
I found that the printing option was a bit buggy and did not allow a preview as in the Manage your Herps and Manage your Enclosures modules and it had the same drawbacks of not allowing you to select a printer that I have mentioned earlier.
Final Thoughts
System requirements are a modest 133Mhz or faster PC with 32 MB of RAM running Windows 95 or higher and 5 MB of free drive space. The download itself is only 3 MB and should only take a couple of minutes for even people with a dial-up connection.
I would just like to say that except for some very minor issues that this software is great to help keep your records in order. I like the nice simple straight forward interface. It's simple enough for beginners to use and has enough features that experienced hobbyists and breeders will find it useful! The best thing about this software is the cost. The software is offered for free by the author, though donations are gladly accepted. You can download the software from http://www.thegeckocam.com/hcs/download/index.php.
Support for the product is offered via e-mail or on-line forums at The Gecko Cam. The forums are great since you can receive help from other users of the software as well as read to see if your question has already been asked and answered. It is nice to see a piece of freeware software out there with support.
Help reptiles in need by donating to our Adoption Fund! Your donations will help feed and house reptiles waiting for adoption.