Project Website for cmBot
I created a project website for my newly released Android app cmBot at SourceForge.
It will be filled with more content in the next weeks.
This is the address: http://code.google.com/p/cmbot/
Introducing cmBotLast summer I bought my first smartphone. It runs Google’s Linux-based operating system Android. When a professor told me that mobile computing didn’t have anything to do with bioinformatics, I asked myself “… or does it?”. Since then I wanted to apply mobile computing to topics from computational molecular biology. Today I introduce my first shot at doing so. I proudly announce the release of a PDB app for Android smartphones! The app consumes the PDB API. This means it looks up PDB ID’s and then parses the XML file the database returns in response. Finally, cmBot displays a nice overview of the file’s major facts - including a graphic visualization of the protein. Who needs the app? Not only computational molecular biologists or bioinformaticians like me use the Protein Data Bank PDB. But also biologists, chemists, pharmacists, and all those who are somewhere in between. If you are interested in a particular protein and your PC or laptop is not available, you may want to look up the basic information on your mobile phone. cmBot makes this possible in no time at all! How to use the app? When you start the app, your phone displays a search field with the default text “Enter PDB ID…”. After entering the PDB identifier of your protein, which may be something like 2KTG for example, you submit it. Now the app connects to the PDB and retrieves the corresponding data, if the identifier exists.
“Structure ID” and “PubMed ID” are displayed as links so the corresponding PDB and PubMed sites are just one click away. How to get cmBot? cmBot is not (yet) available from the Android app store, but you can install it following the instructions given below. There’s only one prerequisite: You need a smartphone running Android 2.2 or higher.
What does it look like?
What’s in the future? This is just the first release of my app. I am going to improve it in the coming weeks and months. I’m planning on integrating more functionality, including better integration with other databases, and a molecule viewer (actually I’ve already written a bunch of code for this). Your feedback is greatly appreciated, so I can improve my app’s usability, too. Entwicklung einer Bioinfo-Datenbanken-App für AndroidenZur Zeit entwickle ich in meiner Freizeit eine App für Smartphones, auf denen das Betriebssystem Android läuft. Der Gedanke kam mir vor einigen Wochen. Zu meiner Überraschung musste ich feststellen, dass beispielsweise die RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB) keine Android-App anbietet, sondern nur eine für’s iPhone. Dann hab ich mich also an die Arbeit gemacht. Was kann die App? Nach einem ersten Release, das bald kommen wird, werde ich wohl noch Schnittstellen zu einigen anderen bioinformatisch relevanten Datenbanken einbauen, sowie die Suchergebnisseite erweitern. Und nun noch ein paar Screenshots… Das Suchformular: Eine Suchergebnisseite:
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