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Greetings!
As you know, for the past year and a half we have been hard at work on a major overhaul of our Nature's Notebook app. We've tried to be very transparent with you all throughout the project as we greatly value the time and effort you spend on collecting data with Nature's Notebook. I wanted to provide an update on where we are at with the project and what you can expect over the coming months.
Current status of the Nature's Notebook new app project
First, I want to extend my sincere apology for the delay in the release of the app. We had hoped to have the app available this past Spring. However, several aspects of this project have proved much more time intensive than we anticipated, including some of our new features and how the app interfaces with the many ways we deliver the data.
One of these additions is a map with individual plant locations, a long requested feature of observers and the researchers and decision-makers who use Nature's Notebook data. While this is a complicated feature to implement, we are confident that this will be an extremely useful tool in the app.
Our first priority with this app revamp is to ensure that we deliver an app that works better than our current app. We will not release an app that has significant usability issues or that has any potential to impact data quality.
What's next
We are getting very close to having all of the features for our first release in the development version of the app. Over the coming weeks, we will continue to release versions of the app to our group of beta testers to ensure that the new features are working as intended for various observers with different sites, species, Local Phenology Programs, etc.
After the features are well-tested, our next step will be testing the connection between the app and the various tools that we use to deliver Nature's Notebook data. This stage has the most uncertainly in terms of timeframe, as we may run into issues that will further delay release. For that reason, we no longer anticipate a September release of the app.
Rest assured that we will continue to work extremely hard to deliver the app as soon as possible.
Please continue to follow our new app webpage or sign up as a beta tester to be the first to test the latest version of the app.
Please feel free to reply to this email with any questions.
Sincerely,
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