When we first made the Forum, I imagined this category could be used to collate recent iNat updates every month or so but that didn’t happen until @bouteloua and the other @forum_moderators started one for December, so a big thank you to them! This first one really covers all of 2020, future ones will cover shorter periods of time. Since this is just an announcement of updates, I’ve disabled replies.
General
- New countries Finland and Israel joined the iNaturalist network
- Updated computer vision model in March
- More robust support for Markdown text formatting
- Many additional translations throughout the websites and apps
- Added less disruptive taxon splitting for improved taxonomic curation
- Improved Wikipedia integration
- Improved Mushroom Observer imports
- Prevention of duplicate faves and annotations
- Added hats, phone cases, and new shirt designs in the iNat Store
Website
- Designed new Life Lists
- See related post about upcoming changes to other lists on iNaturalist
- Added text formatting buttons for comments and IDs
- Added a setting for collection projects to show observations from members only
- Updates to the Year in Review, e.g. “Observation Streaks” and “Compare to Previous Years” sections
- Made sorts/filters on taxon page photo browser and batch edit observations pages “sticky”
- Added sorting for observation fields
- Improvements to taxon page seasonality charts
Android
- Send and receive direct messages
- Support for HEIF files
iOS
- Completed major app renovation, paving the way for feature parity with Android
- Improvements to database synchronization
- Added sign-in with Apple (available on the website too)
Seek
- Camera can now automatically take a photo at the moment a species is identified
- Switch between identifying plants vs. non-plants to help narrow down species suggestions (currently Android only)
- Released the last challenge of the year: the Ecosystem Challenge!
- App language can be selected separate from device language
For hundreds of other bug fixes and iNat updates, check out iNaturalist on github and the iNaturalist Blog.