A new version of Plant Base is released – 2.1.6. This time it includes updated database contents, which is at Release 26.
The program version is basically a minor maintenance release, with no obvious big changes. The main incentive for the release was to bring the executable build up to the latest available code complier and database engine. This gave opportunities to improve the code efficiency and possibly program stability. This resulted in a lot of internal code changes and the work kept me busy for the last couple of months.
A number of small improvements were made along way – most noticeable are some further enhancements to the HTML Reporting function. This feature continues to be of considerable interest to certain users, predominately professionals, and accounts for a large part of my email queries. There are a couple of other small interface changes and just a few bug fixes. So this update is probably worth installing for most users.
As always, it is difficult to know when to issue an update to the plant data itself, but it seemed appropriate to include it now as it has been some time since the last one. There are a considerable number of updates to existing plants, some of which are name changes that have been introduced recently. There are also new plant and pictures, which means that the database file size (and install size) is gradually increasing. The database now has just under 12,000 plants and over 6,000 pictures.
As usual the program can be updated separately from the database. Existing users may prefer to delay updating the database to a convenient time.
The version is the same for all editions, Windows X86, X64 and Mac OSX. I’ve dropped the Beta designation from the Mac program as it has been in use for some while with no serious problems reported. Unfortunately in-house testing is still rather limited for us because we only have one system, but feedback has been generally good.
Online users of the free web database have not been forgotten – it was updated to the same data release content even before the software products were released.