Author deserves thanks
This is not only one of the finest tools available for molecular visualisation on any platform, it is provided free by a guy who already does plenty for the iOS community through tireless answering of questions on that famous Q&A web site. Not content to rest at that, he makes the source code available for anyone to download and learn from. If you want to teach an iOS programmer about selfless, point them this way. Thanks Brad, hope I get to meet you one day and shake your hand.
Show less
molecule library needed
This is a great early attempt, but you need to know your molecules to be able to search out the ones desired. Typing in the example of 'hemo' with the wildcard '*', ie 'hemo*' gives a great list, but a library of basic or available image molecular shortcuts would be nice. I found that very abbreviated searches such as 'Ab*' gave results, but 'Ac*' gave none. Also, downloading a very large molecule such as a Proteasome component crashed the app when switching from ball and stick to cylinder view, then back to ball and stick.
Show less
Good start, great potential
App is easy to navigate. Integration with PDB a big plus. It's a great experience manipulating molecules with your fingers. Some criticisms:
- lack of ribbon view makes this impractical for visualising most proteins
- quite choppy when in spacefiller view. Needs further optimising
- a surface view would be excellent
- as would the ability to colour code different residues from the default, or at least being able to find out what residue is what colour in the cylinder view.
- the ability to highlight one or more residues.
- lack of ribbon view makes this impractical for visualising most proteins
- quite choppy when in spacefiller view. Needs further optimising
- a surface view would be excellent
- as would the ability to colour code different residues from the default, or at least being able to find out what residue is what colour in the cylinder view.
- the ability to highlight one or more residues.
Show less
Promising...
The interface is pleasant to use, with the touch controls for rotating, zooming etc working nicely. In some ways this is better than using a mouse in a conventional viewer. There are some additional features that are needed for viewing macromolecules, such as those included with the app. The most important of these is an option for a ribbon or cartoon view, as all atom representations of proteins don't really show much of value. It would also be useful to be able to select parts of molecules and then render them differently to highlight features. A useful but less critical feature would be an option for stereo views. The interface for searching the protein data bank is quirky - I could only get it to work with one word queries. The other method for retrieving files - direct url entry - also failed for me with an address copied directly from the rcsb site in safari, with a "this is not a pdb file" error. Overall a promising app that needs a few extra features and bug fixes to be a genuinely useful app.
Show less
Great! And free!
Initial version had issues with new molecule downloading but is now all fixed! Good software and very interesting!!
Good control
But bad 3D qua
Eh
It's good to view your protein of interest, however there is no option to view just the wire backbone, select chains, groups or to really distinguish and indivisualise amino acid residues. It's really only good for the really basic views of proteins.... I might stick with RasMol.
Promising and fun little app
Relatively few science-oriented applications are availble for the iPhone/iPod touch. It's great to see this among them. I've managed to crash the program - not the device - a couple of times but this is a great start and actually wouldn't require too much more to be a useful pocket tool. If there was a screen displaying the residue IDs+sequence of the molecule in which I could select 'hot' residues, and then in the molecular view mode be able to centre on and flick through them, this would be a great companion when listening to talks/reading papers.
Show less
Total crap
Can't I rate this lower than 1 star??? Crashes whenever I try to download a new molecule. Waste of memory. I'd like to know who rated it high and called it "cool". Every piece of crap app has at least one 5 star review. Is that just some ploy by the developer to get people to download it???
Sad. Wanted this to work...
Crashes every time I try to search for a molecule. Disappointing.
