Getting started
About Firetail
Welcome to Firetail. Firetail provides you with a blazingly fast environment for the visualisation and annotation of modern, large-scale GPS, burst and tracking data.
This manual should guide you through the basic steps of getting Firetail productive in your research environment.
Installation
Obtain and install the latest copy of Firetail from:
Licensing
Obtaining a license for your Firetail removes the evaluation time limit of 10 minutes. Additionally, the limitations restricting GPS samples and burst samples will be adapted to your needs, based on the license you obtain.
For details, see our licensing section.
Quick start
Sample projects
For a quick start use one of our sample projects.
Closing a project
Use File > Close to close the currently opened project. This option will be triggered automatically on certain events.
Overview of Firetail
In the screenshot above we highlighted the most essential elements of firetail:
| Section | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| A | Window Selection Tabs | hide/show panels |
| B | Open Files Panel | activate data subsets, bursts, focus regions |
| C | Event Data Panel | event data for a given timestamp |
| D | Acceleration Data Panel | acceleration data |
| E | Map Window | Visual representation of GPS tracks and tags/individuals |
| F | Time Control | control the active timestamp, time bracketing, speed |
| G | Burst Annotations | select and annotate GPS data |
For quicker workflows memorize Firetail’s Keyboard Shortcuts
Panels
Firetail provides panels/windows for all essential features. You may switch acceleration and event panels to window-mode and place them to get the layout that best suits your requirements (menu: Window > Acceleration Data and Window > Event Data)
Visible Layers
Firetail provides you with several layers of information like landmass, water, satellite images and sunrise information.
Working with local data
Firetail is designed with Movebank in mind in terms of download and annotation of published datasets. Nonetheless local Movebank CSV data can be imported unless it is missing crucial attributes. Previously downloaded movebank sets can be accessed directly from the File > Open Downloaded Data menu.
See section Working with local data for more details.