Brown Sign 2.0 is a full redesign, built around getting you to a sign faster and telling you more once you find one. The Scan tab now opens straight into a live camera. The viewfinder is ready the moment you arrive, so you can frame the sign and shoot without anything getting in the way first. Nearby is richer. Tap a landmark on the map and you get a real card now: its photo, how far away it is, a rough walk time, and one tap to open the details or get directions, all without leaving the map. Pins gather into neat clusters as you pan across a region, then split back apart as you zoom in. History groups your finds by day, so the place you saw last weekend is easy to come back to. And the whole app got a fresh coat of paint: green for the things you tap, brown for the Brown Sign identity, larger rounded cards, and a redrawn signpost throughout.

New: get to the camera before the sign is gone. Say "Scan a sign with Brown Sign" to Siri, add the new Brown Sign button to Control Center, the Lock Screen, or the Action button, or long-press the app icon. Every one of them opens the app with the camera already up. There's a shortcut straight to Nearby, too. Also new: landmark pages can show a street-level Look Around preview, so you can see what you'd be pulling off the highway for before you go. Plus some housekeeping: landmark photos in the Nearby list now recover on their own if a download once failed, and landmark locations are more accurate, so directions and Look Around point at the right spot.

New: identify a sign from a photo. The passenger snaps a picture as you drive past, and you look it up at the next stop. Tap the photo button next to the camera on the Scan tab. Brown Sign now also tells you when it can't reach the landmark services, so a dead zone no longer reads as "no results", and lookups are quicker on slow connections because the searches run side by side. The Nearby tab's follow-the-map list got a big reliability pass: refreshing while exploring another area now brings the list home with your results, changing the radius no longer snaps the list away from the area you're browsing, and "Back to your location" fills in anything you're missing at the current radius. Plus kilometer units for metric travelers, clearer messages when something goes wrong, better dark mode contrast, larger touch targets, and more VoiceOver support throughout.

On the Nearby tab, the list now follows the map. Pan the map to a new area, switch to the list, and you'll see the landmarks around that spot instead of the ones back where you started, with the heading updating to match. A new "Back to your location" button brings you home with one tap whenever you want to return.

Reliability and polish. Saved landmark photos now load faster and more reliably as you scroll through your history, the Nearby radius controls and map behave more consistently, and there's a round of small accessibility fixes throughout.

New: when Brown Sign isn't sure a result is the right landmark, it now tells you so you can check the other matches. Nearby is steadier, too. It no longer skips landmarks at the edge of a page of results, the area you pan or widen to is remembered when you reopen the app, a landmark's type and founding year now fill in right away when you tap a result, and the map behaves correctly even near the international date line. Also in this release: a cleaner, more consistent look for the empty and directions screens, clearer wording on the camera and location permission prompts, better dark mode legibility, more VoiceOver and Dynamic Type support, and smoother, lighter photo loading as you scroll.

A steadier Nearby tab. The List and Map switch, the search box, and the radius control now stay on screen in every state, including while landmarks are loading and when an area comes up empty or offline, so you can widen your search or switch views right away instead of waiting. The empty, offline, and permission screens also got a cleaner, more consistent look.

New: zoom in to read distant signs. Pinch to zoom the camera as you frame a shot, with a small readout showing your current zoom. On iPhone models with a telephoto lens, zooming in switches to that lens for a closer, clearer view, and zoomed shots now hold more detail so faraway sign text is easier to read.

Reliability and polish. If camera access is turned off, Brown Sign now shows a clear way to turn it back on instead of a blank screen. Nearby loading is steadier on slow or flaky connections, and a round of layout and accessibility touches keeps the app tidy, including at the largest text sizes.

A search-radius control on the Nearby tab. Tap plus or minus, on the list or right on the map, to widen or tighten your search from 2 up to 25 miles, and the results refresh around you. Widen the search and the list gives a gentle nudge so the landmarks that just came into range are easy to spot. Nearby is also noticeably more responsive: the heavy searching and photo loading now run off the main thread, so the screen stays smooth while results stream in, and more landmarks show their photo on the list and map thanks to a more reliable thumbnail fetch. When an area holds more landmarks than fit in one pass, a Load more button pulls in the rest.

Faster, clearer Nearby on first launch. The first time you open Nearby, Brown Sign starts searching as soon as a recent location is available instead of waiting on a fresh GPS lock, so your landmarks appear sooner. And while it's working, the screen shows what it's doing (finding your location, then searching nearby), with a gentle note if a slow connection makes that first load take a little longer. No more wondering whether it's stuck. The History tab's Map view now works before your first lookup. Switch to Map on an empty History to see a map of where you are.

Reliability improvements. Brown Sign now reads your location more dependably right after launch so your first search and the Nearby tab get it sooner, and landmark lookups now retry automatically through brief Wikipedia or Wikidata hiccups instead of coming back empty on a passing network blip.

More Nearby landmarks now show a photo in the list and on map pins. Some Wikipedia articles host their lead image on a slightly different endpoint, and a brief network hiccup during the initial Nearby fetch could leave those photos blank. Brown Sign now retries the photo lookup when Wikipedia is slow, and runs the full image-fallback chain when you tap a landmark — so missing thumbnails fill in instead of staying blank.

Pan-search on the Nearby map is now more responsive: when you sweep the map across a region, Brown Sign cancels the older in-flight search in favor of the spot you actually landed on, so the new pins land faster. Plus a lighter app download.

Hiking trails, long-distance trails, and water trails now show up on the Nearby list and map when one's within range of you. Also fixed three landmark categories that had been quietly missing from Nearby because of stale identifiers in the curated landmark filter: National Wildlife Refuges, National Historic Landmarks, and memorials now appear like the rest.

Past lookups for places with sparse Wikipedia data could end up on your History list without showing up on the History map. The app now reads coordinates straight from the article text when they aren't tagged, so every landmark you've looked up drops a pin — including out-of-region finds whose articles list the location only inline. Looking up a previously missing-pin landmark again will fill in its location automatically.

Faster cold-start on the Nearby tab. Pins from your last session now appear instantly when you reopen the app, while a fresh search runs in the background — and the closest landmarks render before the rest of the list finishes loading. Pull-to-refresh is smoother: no more jump at the top of the list when results update. More landmarks show a thumbnail in the list and on map pins. Articles whose photos only appear inline in the body (like swing bridges) used to fall back to a placeholder; we now find those images too. Polish: list cards across Scan, Nearby, and History now end exactly with the last row instead of extending the parchment past the content; section headers are sized consistently across the three tabs; and Nearby's search field shows an explicit "No results" message when nothing matches.

Visual polish across the whole app. • Search fields on Nearby and History now highlight green when active, matching the Scan tab's existing focus pattern. Magnifying-glass icon added to Scan's search field to match. • Redesigned List/Map switcher on Nearby and History — taller and properly aligned with the search field below it. • Unified rounded corners across cards, buttons, lists, the map, and pin callouts. • Brown brand color tuned for consistency across map pins, secondary action buttons, placeholder thumbnails, and the Scan tab's background wash. • History empty state redesigned to feel more inviting — same icon-and-text layout as Scan's "how it works" steps. • Smaller touches: tighter padding around cards, sentence-case button labels, a brighter selected-state on the segmented control in dark mode, and no more placeholder flash on History rows when navigating from a Nearby tap.

What's New (Version 1.4.2) Faster cold-start on the Nearby tab. Pins from your last session now appear instantly when you reopen the app, while a fresh search runs in the background — and the closest landmarks render before the rest of the list finishes loading. Pull-to-refresh is smoother: no more jump at the top of the list when results update. More landmarks show a thumbnail in the list and on map pins. Articles whose photos only appear inline in the body (like swing bridges) used to fall back to a placeholder; we now find those images too. Polish: list cards across Scan, Nearby, and History now end exactly with the last row instead of extending the parchment past the content; section headers are sized consistently across the three tabs; and Nearby's search field shows an explicit "No results" message when nothing matches.

Polish pass: • Cleaner list cards on Nearby and History — refined date labels ("Found" on Scan recents, "Viewed" on History rows) and a touch more breathing room. • Larger, easier-to-scan "Snap / Identify / Save" guide on the empty Scan tab. • Consistent spacing above the tab bar across Scan, Nearby, and History — every tab now sits the same distance above the buttons.

1.4.0 brings hide-and-restore for Nearby landmarks (swipe left), live search filtering on Nearby and History, a warmer parchment-and- forest-green palette tuned for both light and dark mode, and an auto- retry on cold start so you don't have to manually refresh the Nearby tab. Plus a stack of small fixes — cleaner edit modes, consistent swipe gestures, tighter spacing, faster keyboard dismissal.

• Tap anywhere on a map callout card to open the full landmark — not just the View Details button. • Detail view now shows additional Wikipedia images in a swipeable carousel when an article has more than one. • Snap a landmark sign tab can now dismiss the captured photo preview.

Nearby cleaned up — only brown-sign-worthy landmarks now (historic places, parks, monuments, museums, landmark churches). Active high schools, hospitals, fire stations, and commuter stations are filtered out. Search radius switched to 5 miles, and network requests auto-retry through transient blips.

Fixes missing summaries for some Wikipedia landmarks in History and Recent Finds. Affected items backfill automatically the next time they appear — no re-scan needed.

v1.2.0 Nearby got a pan-to-search map: move the map to any area and new landmarks pop in as you explore. Pan across a state and the pins accumulate into a trail along your route. Tap the refresh button to snap back home. Also in this release: • Nearby list no longer surfaces generic highways, interstates, or rail lines (historic routes like Lincoln Highway still show up). • Fixed a rare bug where tapping a Recent Find on the Scan tab could open a blank detail sheet. • Results now show their article image in cases where Wikipedia's preview heuristic was missing it.