Fieldnote

The problem

I kept seeing plants while traveling and could never remember their names afterwards. Every identification app I tried treated the ID as the product: point, shoot, get a label, forget it. The label was never the interesting part — the encounter was. Fieldnote is a journal first: photos, notes, time, and place, accumulating into a personal record like a sketch notebook for the natural world.

Identification that earns trust

Fieldnote now relies primarily on the iNaturalist identification API. I originally built an on-device CoreML fallback, but its results were not reliable enough to be the experience's foundation. The API gives people a much better starting point; the app presents an identification as a useful suggestion, then lets them save the encounter with their own notes, photos, time, and place.

A catalog shaped by where you are

• Region-aware discovery. Location and iNaturalist place IDs tune Explore to what grows nearby, including seasonal “Active in July” groupings.
• A catalog that can grow. Server-enriched region packs pull locally relevant taxa from iNaturalist and GBIF, with real family data, summaries, and licensed photos—not a static list of bundled species.
• Art with a point of view. The catalog also includes 97 public-domain botanical plates, bringing texture and personality to species cards without making the app feel like a generic photo grid.

Designed for field notes, not taxonomy homework

The design language is “field paper, glass chrome”: warm, opaque paper cards hold the content; glass is reserved for floating controls like the tab bar and pinned headers. A custom AVFoundation camera makes capture feel native to the app, while the collection, gallery, and profile badges give each discovery a reason to stay memorable.

Shipping details matter

Fieldnote syncs its journal and photos through iCloud, includes an annual and lifetime StoreKit offering, and enriches plant details with Wikipedia. One recent release cut the real archive size by roughly 5×: HEIC imagery had been re-decompressed by Xcode's asset compiler, so I moved the bulk images out of the asset catalog and load them as loose files at runtime. It is the kind of quiet engineering work that keeps a rich visual product practical to download.