Highlight 1.1 just went live in the App Store.  It’s our biggest update since we launched and we’re really excited to show it to you.  Here are some of the more notable improvements:

Nearby now

Highlight now tells you which people in your timeline are still nearby.  For these people, the timestamp above the map will say “now”.  This makes it easier to know when friends might still be around to meet up, or to find people who are in the room with you.

Search

The upper right of the feed now has a search box, so you can quickly find anyone from your history. Also, you can search for anyone nearby by name, even if they’re not currently showing up in your feed.  This will help you when you are talking to someone in a crowded room and want to pull up their profile.

Redesigned navigation

A new left-hand navigation panel gives you quick access to things like your profile, your blurb, and your settings.  It also provides a quick way to pause Highlight, which stops location services from being used until the next time you open the app.  This is a good way to save battery life in an environment like SXSW.

Nearby now, search, and left-hand navigation:

Highlighting

Next to the “Message” button on the profile you’ll now see a new button: “Highlight”.  Highlighting is a lightweight way to mark people who seem interesting, or who look like they’ve done cool things.

Highlighting is public, so you can look at other people’s profiles and see who they have highlighted.

The people you have highlighted (and the people who have highlighted you) are saved to folders in the new left-hand navigation panel, so you can pull up their profiles anytime.  Highlighting will also help the system know what type of people you think are interesting so it can better tune your notifications.

Highlight people who seem interesting:

Friend and follow

At the end of each profile you can now find links to the person’s Facebook and Twitter profiles.  This provides a quick way to friend or follow people you’ve enjoyed meeting.  You can add your Twitter handle to your own profile in the settings.

We’ve also made a lot of smaller improvements and have continued to improve things like notification relevance and battery life.

We tried hard to build the new features in a way that didn’t complicate the interface.  Please let us know what you think!  You can get the update here.

For those of you who will be at SXSW, we will be there all week and can’t wait to hang out.  We also have some fun stuff planned to make your time in Austin better.  Stay tuned for more details!