Hi everyone!
Sorry in advance: this is going to be something of a rant, but please bear with me: it is going to be passionate and loving, if a bit rough in places.
Let me start by saying the most important: iNaturalist is the best thing that happened in the naturalist world in decades. Period.
I’m a monthly donor and I intend to keep that going as long as possible.
I also must insist that, even as it is, iNat next is the best naturalist app I have seen (and I have tried most).
It is so for many reasons, among which are the following:
- It works anywhere, regardless of frontiers, where many others stop at pesky borders, it just keeps working
- Computer vision is just amazing: I use it a lot to check thinks in the field, learning a lot in doing so (often I think I know a plant or insect and the app corrects me, showing me it can be something close, but different)
- Computer vision is working OFFLINE ! That is just unbelievable. Imperfect, sure, but so useful !
Now for the “ranty” part:
Context: We are talking of the iNat Next app for Android, which I installed (and update as soon as there is a new version) from the GitHub repository (available from here: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistReactNative ).
I understand that the app is unfinished, but it is obviously the perfect moment to make it better.
On the development side:
This is taking way too long: anything over 12 months is considered a failure, even for a very big and complex app (and I should now: I worked in an IT developement company)… iNat Next has been under official development for 2 years (announced in September 2024 I think, but the dev started late 2021, so 5 years ???).
So, what is taking you so long, guys?
Suggestions and feedback seem to have very little effect: I have reported all this from the app, more than once… I’m not even sure that these are read… so this is why I’m putting all this up here in hope of stirring a discussion at least…
And, yes: I understand that the devs are under no obligation to take all suggestions as demands, but some of my suggestions must at least be half good enough ? No ?
Now for the unsorted list of things I would love to see addressed…
Activity screen:
XXXX added an identification to an observation by you
12h
Most of that text is utterly uninformative: it’s a notification of activity, so obviously XXXX has added an ID or comment, and it IS to an observation by ME considering I’m looking at MY activity panel…
ALL the notifications have exactly the same content. What is the purpose of that screen use?
Instead, it could look like something useful, like this:
XXXX agrees with “Genus species”
Or
XXXX disagrees with ID and suggests “Genus species”
A colored background would be useful to mark the current ID status (green=research, orange=needID, red=Maverick)
These same colors could be used throughout the app, and when they are they should be clearly visible (not the pale green and white scribble of an icon that is used currently: not everyone is a 20 Y old with 20/20 vision…)
Some functions are missing while they were available in the “classic” app, what we call a “regression” in IT parlance:
- It is not possible to search from my observations pages for a taxon of a place. Instead you need to go to “explore”, search there and filter by a user set to yourself: complete loss of time… (especially when the app crashes and you have to do it several times…)… and that was one of the features in the 2024 announcement…
- Species screen is missing the graphs (seasonality, etc.), Why? Surely it must be easy to put them back ?
- When on an observation page, with the classic app, you could swipe to the next/previous observation by sliding to the side. Not any more: you have to go back, select the next or previous record and click it to open it… massive loss of time.
- Android gesture conventions are not always respected: System “go back” gesture often exits the app, when it should go back to previous screen (instead we have to use that tiny icon in the top left, which is sometimes not even working)
Some ergonomic choices are… debatable (and should be left in the end with the user): my main gripe is the zoom used by the camera. Why on earth use a one-finger zoom: this is not a standard choice and is unprecise as can be… Give us the two-finger zoom used EVERYWHERE else, or at least the choice.
Some friends have reported that the camera is too slow, with a long delay between click and effective capture (might be hardware dependent).
On maps, all observation markers could/should be usable to open the corresponding observation.
Display bug: on the miniatures, in tiles mode, the names are displayed at the bottom of the tile, but over the picture, obscuring it (especially because the text is big and cannot be changed to smaller fonts) but worse: sometime the name is incomplete for no clear reason: somehow “Miramella alpina ssp subalpina” is displayed fully , but “Deraeorocoris ruber” is missing the second word… ???
On these tiles also, a marker should be added to color-mark the obs status in green/orange/red as described above (maybe a top left corner in the tile or even a border around it (there is room with that big fat white spacing). Currently you cannot know the ID status of an obs without opening it…
That’s it… for now at least.
So I hope I was not too disrespectful of the work done by the team, and I certainly hope that this will be a useful contribution…
In any case I am and will stay a fervent advocate for the use of iNat (as anyone crossing my path in the field can attest
)
Cheers !