Map controls in a single bar, plus a Filters panel

The Monitoring map had ended up with six controls spread across three overlapping strips and all four corners of the screen: the site search at the top right, the year selector and the embed button on one side, the KPI layers selector further down, and the group that switches between adopted oases and corporate sites which — because of the way it was anchored — drifted on its own as you scrolled the page or changed the window width. Finding the right control meant hunting for it every time, and more than one report told us exactly that: they are scattered everywhere. Now every control lives on the surface of the map, on a single row: in the centre the year selector, the site search bar and the choice between adopted oases and corporate sites; on the right the "Filters" button and the one that generates the code to embed the map elsewhere. The search bar has become the centrepiece: it went from a low pill squeezed into a corner to a wide field, centred on the map and with larger text, which grows further while you are typing. The group of controls is centred on the actual map rather than on its neighbours, so it stays in the middle even when the labels change length from one language to another — something that previously shifted everything by a couple of centimetres. When the window is too narrow for everything to fit on one row, the search bar shrinks down to a sensible limit and then the whole group drops to a second row, where it has all the space again: the order of the controls never changes and whatever you were typing is not lost in the transition. The translucent background the controls rest on is now the same for all of them, so they read as one set instead of looking like pieces that arrived at different times. Maps you have already embedded in other websites keep exactly the controls and positions they had before, so nothing changes in what you have published, and the phone and tablet version has not been touched. You will find the new bar at XNatura → Monitoring → Map.

Until yesterday the map filters were a row of permanently open controls resting on top of the tiles: they took up a far from small portion of the map exactly where you wanted to look at your sites, and there was no way to close them once you were done. They are now gathered behind a single "Filters" button on the right-hand side of the map: you open it, make your choices, close it, and the map goes back to doing its job. Inside the panel the controls are ordered by how often they are used and split into sections with their own headings and dividers: the site filter, the stakeholders and the KPI layers. The KPI layers section finally says what it does: you pick the indicator the map pins are coloured by, you are not hiding any site, and sites for which that indicator is unavailable stay visible, marked as "Not detected". That clarification matters more than it may seem, because in the past several people read that selector as a filter and wondered where the missing sites had gone — when in fact they were all there, just grey. The active indicator is now recognisable at a glance, because its chip carries a tick next to the name. When a site filter is active, the "Filters" button lights up with a coloured border, so you never end up looking at a filtered map believing it to be complete. The panel's three two-way selectors — the view, the site filter and the comparison between the site area and the control area — now look the same, whereas one of the three used to be styled differently from the other two and looked as if it belonged to another page. If there are more entries than fit vertically, the panel scrolls inside itself with the same scrollbar as the rest of the platform. You will find it at XNatura → Monitoring → Map → Filters.

On the Monitoring map every pin is coloured according to the indicator you have chosen, and sites with no data for it stay grey with the "Not detected" label. It could happen, however, that they all turned grey at once, from the first to the last, giving the impression that the platform had suddenly lost the data for every single site. This occurred when you changed the year or a filter in quick succession: the request still in flight was interrupted by the new one and, because it was not retried, a single interruption was enough to leave the map without numbers. The heart of the matter is that the map treated "I received no answer" and "I received an answer: no data" as the same thing, and when in doubt it bet on the second: the result was a map confidently stating something false. At the same moment the control that lets you compare the site area with the control area was cut in half too, leaving a single option visible and already selected, which looked like a rendering glitch. The map now keeps the last answer it genuinely received and goes on showing those colours until a new one arrives, so moving quickly from one year to another no longer wipes anything out. Only a real answer can redefine the list of sites, while an interruption or an error no longer changes what you are looking at. You need to do nothing to benefit from the fix and nothing changes in the look of the map: all that changes is that the colours you read always correspond to data that actually arrived. You will notice it at XNatura → Monitoring → Map, moving freely between years, views and filters.

Among the KPI layers there is a control that decides whether the indicator is read on your site's area or on the surrounding control area: it is the comparison that tells you whether a value is good in absolute terms or only relative to the context the site sits in. That control could appear with only one of its two options available, the control area one, which made the comparison simply impossible. It happened when you returned to a year you had already looked at: the platform served the data it already held in memory without repeating the request and, by not repeating it, carried over the configuration of the last year actually downloaded. So it was enough to move from a year with delimited sites to one that has none and then come back to find the control halved, even though you were on a year that did have the data for the comparison. The decision to show or hide that control is now derived from the sites actually present on the map at that moment, rather than from what happened during the last download, so it always reflects the year you are looking at. We also changed the behaviour for when there genuinely is no delimited site: a lone, already-selected button used to stay visible, governing nothing and reading like a bug, whereas now the whole row disappears, because a control with no alternatives is not a choice. No action is needed on your side and the data shown does not change: all that changes is that the control is there when it makes sense and absent when it does not. You will find it at XNatura → Monitoring → Map → Filters, in the KPI layers section.

In the "The numbers that really matter" section of the Overview, hives were summarised by a single card titled "Adopted hives". That title did not describe every case, though: some platforms do not adopt hives in our beekeepers' apiaries but install our technology on their own land, and they saw those hives counted under the word "adopted". Anyone visiting their page therefore read a statement that did not match the project described a few lines above, and it was reported to us as a particularly awkward error to show to their own guests. The card has now become two, each with its own caption explaining which hives it refers to: "Monitored hives", meaning the ones installed on your sites, and "Adopted hives", meaning the ones looked after in our beekeepers' apiaries. The distinction is not just a different label on the same number: the two cards count different things, based on where the hive physically stands, and their sum matches exactly the total the platform showed before, so no hive is counted twice or lost along the way. As with the other cards in the section, a card that would read zero is not shown at all: if you have no hives installed on your sites you will keep seeing only the adoptions one, and vice versa. Platforms with adoptions only, which are the majority, see exactly what they saw before and need to do nothing. While we were there, we made sure the device count is calculated once and shared between the numbers card and the sensors card, so the two can no longer tell different stories. You will find the cards at XNatura → Overview → The numbers that matter.

In the overview of impacts, dependencies and risks, and in all of its subsections, anyone with editing permissions is supposed to be able to add a technical comment, so the numbers can be accompanied by an explanation aimed at whoever reads the page. The command to add one, however, never appeared — not even for people with administration permissions on the platform. The situation was all the more confusing because everything else worked normally: existing comments could be read, edited and even deleted, so the dialog opened as expected but offered no way to write a new one. The cause was a permission check designed for comments attached to a single site, mistakenly applied to those that concern the whole platform as well: on a page that is not about a specific site that check could get no answer, and with no answer it denied permission to everyone. Platform-level comments now follow the rule that belongs to them, the same one a twin editor in another Monitoring section had already been using for some time: editing permissions on the platform count, and nothing else. Comments attached to a single site, on the other hand, keep honouring exactly the previous check, so nothing was widened that should not have been. Nothing has changed in the look of the comments dialog or in the way comments are shown to whoever reads the page: the button that lets you write one is simply back. If you tried to add a comment in that section in the past and gave up, you can try again at XNatura → Monitoring → Risks and Opportunities.

Over the past few months the land use page had accumulated a lot of information written in genuinely tiny type: the legend captions, the version labels, the notes on where the data comes from and the counters had reached sizes below which text is no longer comfortable to read on any screen. It was reported to us in plain words, and we chose not to act only on the box that had been flagged but to set a minimum size valid for the whole page, so the fix does not leave behind a forgotten corner smaller than all the others. Thirty-three pieces of text, spread across eleven different parts of the page, were raised to the new minimum size; those that were already large enough were left untouched, so the visual hierarchy stays exactly as it was. No box had to be widened to make room, because each enlarged text either already had enough headroom or wraps by itself: the tightest case was measured in the language where the sentence is longest, to be certain it is not cut off in any translation. While we were there, we tidied up the scrollbars: three different ones were visible on the same page — a light grey one, the browser default, and two dark ones in different shades — and side by side they clashed like three styles of furniture in one room. They all now use the platform's scrollbar and follow the theme you have chosen, light or dark. The change concerns appearance only: the data, the controls and the layout of the page have not been altered in any way. You will notice it as soon as you open XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Land use, above all in the list on the left and in the version history cards.

On the Monitoring map, when you choose an indicator, the site pins are coloured along a scale and the legend explaining how to read those colours appears at the bottom. As long as the indicator selector was permanently visible beside the map, the indicator's name could be read there and the legend could afford to show only the colour scale. Now that the selector lives inside the "Filters" panel, which opens and closes, the scale risked staying on screen without saying what it referred to any more: colours with no title, which is information that helps very little. That is why the legend now carries the name of the active indicator, written above the scale, and has become a small card with the same translucent background as the other elements resting on the map. A glance at the bottom of the map is therefore enough to know what you are looking at, even if you opened the map, went elsewhere and came back half an hour later. The legend still shows the extremes of the scale exactly as before, so there is nothing to relearn. In maps you embed in other websites the legend stays identical to before, with no title, because there the indicator selector is always on screen and the name can already be read next to the map. You will find it at XNatura → Monitoring → Map, at the bottom, whenever an indicator is active.