About

How it started

Inchgrove started life as an increasingly elaborate Microsoft Access database. That was fine, as these things go, but not exactly portable — I got tired of scribbling notes on scraps of paper out among the trees, then transcribing them once I was back at my desk. And the photos. So many photos, all needing copying and sorting by hand.

What I actually wanted

What I wanted was a phone app for taking notes and photos standing in front of a tree, and a desktop app for the more contemplative work — planning, reviewing progress, general plotting and scheming. The two needed to sync, but without requiring an internet connection out in the garden, which for me is something of a wifi and mobile dead zone.

Why there's no (public) cloud

When I started thinking about sharing Inchgrove more widely, I also decided against a central cloud holding everyone's records and photos. Photos take up real space, and that would have meant monthly charges just to keep the app running. From my background in biodiversity informatics, I also liked the idea of giving people more control over their own data — you choose how to back it up, and you can always get it out again as plain text, ready to open in something like Excel if you ever want to.

You can however link the app to your own Dropbox or OneDrive cloud storage if you want to keep your data automatically backed up online, and to sync your data between the mobile and desktop versions. For most users, the free tier of either will probably be ok.

Where it's going

It's grown a fair bit since then, and I'm sure there will always be something people want to record about their trees that I haven't thought of yet. I've tried to keep it extensible — you can add your own custom fields for exactly that — but I'm always glad to hear about a feature that would be useful more broadly. Write to me at info@inchgrove.co.uk.