Version 0.13

Before · After

Added

• All of France is covered now, not just the rainy west. Three more parts of the country have their own plant lists, each a genuinely different set of plants rather than the same list shuffled: the Mediterranean south (Provence, the Languedoc coast and Corsica — holm oak, strawberry tree, mastic, cistus, thyme and lavender, where the hard part of the year is the dry summer, not the winter), the continental east (Burgundy, Lorraine, Alsace and the Rhône — oak, beech, hornbeam, lime, hawthorn and the chalk-meadow flowers that most French butterflies grow up on), and the Alps (spruce, larch, arolla pine, bilberry, alpenrose and gentian, for gardens high enough to have real snow). Stand anywhere in mainland France and the app will now know which of the four lists is yours. The Pyrenees are deliberately left out for now: they're a different set of plants again, and we'd rather say "not yet" than guess.
• A lot more to plant in the Pacific Northwest. The west-of-the-Cascades list grows from 24 plants to 44 — red alder, bitter cherry, vine maple, western hemlock, Oregon ash and Pacific dogwood among the trees; salmonberry, red elderberry, evergreen huckleberry, ninebark, twinberry and hazelnut among the shrubs; and, for the first time in this region, a milkweed — showy milkweed, the only thing a monarch caterpillar can eat, and the western monarch badly needs more of it.
• Twenty new creatures on the wildlife pages, most of them European, so browsing by animal now works for France too. Some of the best stories in the whole app are in here: the large blue, whose caterpillar eats wild thyme for a few weeks and then gets carried into an ants' nest, where it spends ten months eating the ants' own young; the spotted nutcracker, which buries tens of thousands of pine seeds each autumn and plants the next Alpine forest with the ones it forgets; and the two-tailed pasha, Europe's biggest butterfly, which can raise its young on one plant only.
• Every release now has a page of its own. The What's new page is one long list, which made "look at what just shipped" impossible to share — you could only send someone the whole page and tell them where to scroll. Now each release also lives at its own address, like Version 0.12: tap a release's title to open it on its own, with a link back to all releases and links on to the ones either side of it. The address stays put as new releases pile up on top.
• Indigene now reaches its first place outside the United States: the mild, rainy Atlantic west and north of France — Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, Rennes, Lille and the countryside between. Stand in a spot there and you'll get native French plants — oak and hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel, woodland bluebells, honeysuckle and foxgloves — ranked for your exact spot, each with what it does for local birds, bees and butterflies. It's a carefully chosen starter list that will grow — and the Mediterranean south, the Alps and eastern France have since landed alongside it (see above), so the whole of mainland France is covered. (The app itself still speaks English for now — French wording is the next step.)
• The app now understands Europe's natural regions, not only North America's. Online, it checks the official European map of biogeographical regions — Atlantic, Continental, Alpine, Mediterranean — to tell whether a French spot is in the Atlantic zone this first list is really for, and says so plainly when it isn't yet.
• Elevation and slope now work anywhere in the world, not just the US: outside the United States the app reads the land's height from a global source, so the new French spots get the same "how high, how steep" reading.
• A page that shows our working. Where our numbers come from lays out, in plain words, where every figure in Indigene actually comes from — and marks each one as counted from real data, worked out by the app, or our own estimate. It also says what we're assuming, and names the numbers we think are most likely to be wrong, starting with the 0–100 scores, which are judgments we made rather than anything anyone measured. If you spot a mistake, the page tells you how to tell us. We'd rather be corrected than believed.

Changed

• Explore now leads with places, not paragraphs. It used to open with five plant descriptions, which meant reading a lot before you got to the one thing you actually have to choose: where you are. Each card is now a region — its name, the part of the country it's tuned to, one native starring on the front of it, and three small figures for what the list adds up to. The whole card takes you to that region's plants. The full description of the starring plant lives on the plant's own page, one tap away, which is where it belonged.
• "Or browse by wildlife" has moved below the list of regions. It's a good way in, but it was being offered before anyone had a chance to look at what was behind the first door.
• Explore, the wildlife list and each region's plant list now use a big screen properly. On a laptop they were a phone-shaped ribbon down the middle with empty space either side; now the cards spread into columns, so you see a whole group at a glance instead of scrolling past one card at a time. Sentences keep their comfortable reading width — it's the cards that wanted the room.
• The USDA hardiness zone is its own little badge now, instead of trailing along in brackets after the place. "Pennsylvania (USDA zones 6b–7a)" is now "Pennsylvania" with a small USDA 6b–7a tag beside it — shorter, and the number is easy to spot because it's the one thing on the line that looks like a label. Hover or tap-and-hold it and it explains what the zone means; on the French regions it also says that American zones are a translation there rather than the local way of talking about winter cold. The reference places got shorter too, so they all read as a couple of city names rather than a paragraph — and on a big screen, where the region cards sit side by side, the tags line up in a neat column down the right of each card instead of landing in a different spot on every one.
• The little counts on each card sit at the bottom now, always in the same place. They used to follow the text, so they landed at a different height on every card and you had to hunt for them. They're also shorter — an icon and a number rather than a spelled-out label, which stops them wrapping onto two lines on a phone. Hover or tap-and-hold any of them to read what it means.
• The French caterpillar counts are now counted, not estimated. Every Atlantic France plant shipped with an honest guess at how many kinds of caterpillar it feeds, because no European tally was available to us. One is now — an open dataset covering 5,152 European butterflies and moths — so the guesses are gone and every plant carries a real figure, with the source named on its page. Almost all of them went up: the guesses had been cautious. Blackthorn and wild cherry turned out to feed 318 kinds of caterpillar rather than the 100 and 120 we'd estimated, and cowslip 35 rather than 6. A few went the other way — holly feeds 7, not the 12 we'd guessed. Because these numbers help decide which plants we recommend first, some French results are now in a different order, and we think a fairer one.
• "Where our numbers come from" is easier to read, and says "calculated" instead of "worked out". The page that tells you how sure we are used to be one long list where every line ended in a little capsule — COUNTED, WORKED OUT, OUR ESTIMATE — so you had to read eleven capsules to work out which numbers were solid. Now the numbers are sorted into three groups under plain headings — Counted, Calculated, Estimated — firmest first, with one sentence under each heading saying what it means. You can see at a glance that most of what the app tells you was counted by somebody, and that the 0–100 scores are our own judgment. "Worked out" is gone: the honest word is calculated, meaning the app does the sum itself from measured numbers, using a method someone else published, so you could redo it on paper and get what we got.

Fixed

• The menu at the top of the app no longer spills onto a second line. On many phones the row of links — Explore, Search, Wildlife, and the bookmark — had grown just wide enough to drop below the Indigene name, making the green bar taller than it needed to be. The links now sit tidily on one line again, from small phones up.
• Tapping "Explore" or "Wildlife" at the top of the screen now always takes you to the top of that page. Two things were wrong: the page could end up nudged down by about the height of the green bar, and tapping the name of the section you were already in did nothing at all — so if you were halfway down the wildlife list and tapped "Wildlife" hoping to get back to the top, you stayed put.