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.