Evolution Gives You Cancer

Ph.D. student. Biologist. Takes on more projects than he can handle.

[evolutioncancer]

Outsourcing

That was fast.  Talking to a friend of mine who we lovingly call the "computer whisperer".  Let's see if we can get this thing off the ground.

[evolutioncancer]

[evolutioncancer]

[evolutioncancer]

Outline

I should probably start by outlining what I want the app to do.

At work, I'm a Ph.D. student in the department of Biology.  The specifics of my research aren't really important, but I'm an electrophysiologist.  Specifically, I use the patch-clamp technique to record whole-cell currents from sensory cells.

Description

This app will be a handheld reference tool for the most common resources an electrophysiologist needs.

There, that's probably just vague enough to make anything I actually manage to make work seem on-course.

Here's everything I can think of, from reasonable to pipe-dream, that this app should do to be valuable:

Reference tables for pH buffers

Common ECS/ICS solutions, by research model

Reference tables for chemical blockers

Reference tables for ion channels, including whole-cell I-V profiles

"IV-ID", ability to take a picture of an I-V and have the app identify the underlying ion channel(s) (eg. KCa, KB)

Ability to save traces identified by "IV-ID"

Formula-based simulations of expected whole-cell I-V profile based on adjustable ion concentrations and ion channel makeup of the membrane

Integration with PubMed for easy access to references (eg. automatic search for keywords brought up by "IV-ID")

The last four points certainly fall into the "pipe-dream" category.

One of the main goals is to make the app look good.  There are some moderately useful apps on the market that are clearly made by utilitarian scientists, because they look like shit.  Nice icons, smooth transitions, and the like are key.

The number of people who would actually benefit from an app like this is probably fairly small, so the cost would likely end up around $5.  That means it has to be worth it, so unless I can make most of those bullet-points work, there's probably no point.

[evolutioncancer]

Our Ongoing Mission

I know nothing about the Android platform, other than the fact that I love it.

I know slightly more about programming, but only what I've taught myself, and mostly for web-based applications.  It's my understanding that a knowledge of Javascript helps, so at least I know exactly what I don't know.

It could go either way at this point.  Either I'll stick with this and come up with a rudimentary app that does about 20% of what I want it to, or any of my hundreds of other commitments will catch up with me and this project will get lost in the fray.

Either way, I'm all for teaching myself new things... so here goes nothing!