No surprise for those who know me IRL, surprise for the others: I’m an Apple geek. One day I got an iPod nano, and a few years later, I am hooked to iPhones, iPad, iClouds, etc …
One of the things I secretly dream about is making use of all of these in the lab. Unfortunately, I am in a relatively PC-oriented, old-fashioned, and not-growing-money-on-trees-but-can’t-really-complain kind of lab. Nevertheless, I try to make use of my ‘i’ things here and there … and it turns out to be really useful.
One of the first things you find on the App Store in the “lab science” section is the suite created by Invitrogen (or should I say Life Technologies ?).
Prize for the best app goes to the “cloning bench” ! This is your friend if you do molecular cloning. It will calculate a lot of things, find the best buffers for enzymes, etc …
.
Prize for the most disturbing and “WTF” app goes to the “Gathering Light”. Here is the description from the website : “Long hours in the lab can leave even the most seasoned researcher flat on the bench. Refresh yourself with Gathering Light, a new Gibco® game and mobile app.” Right ? Right ? Worst part is that this game comes with the most annoying and stressful background music on earth, so don’t even bother downloading this one.
So, I’m not doing promotion for Invitrogen here, but some people might not know these apps exist, and some of them are actually quite nice. There is also one for making conversions (yeah, yeah, the young generation is lazy), a guide for cell imaging, staining, fluorescence, etc …
iLIKE, you like ?
PhD-bility 
Until now, every science-oriented application I downloaded turned out to me to be more gadget than usefull but I will keep searching ! To be precise, sometimes it’s just more complicated to grab the phone in the office, launch the application and apply the right settings than just writting on a paper. So for the moment, i’MNotSure 🙂
i’MNotSure either actually, it’s just the way I wrote that sound very convincing ! ;D
i quite like Current Protocols DNA/RNA/Protein molecular weight finder and the NEB restriction digest app 🙂
Indeed, the NEB app is great ! For the molecular weights calculations, I will admit that I just calculate these things on papers, because I have gloves on, and don’t to touch the phone/pad, etc …
Thank God I’m in an Apple Lab! I couldn’t do anymore with the Papers program for my papers. Although I guess they also made a pc version quite recently…
Guess I’ll have to download the NEB though, haven’t tried it before. Thanks for the tip 🙂
Lucky you ! I used to have Papers, now I have Mendeley. Not bad, but not the same thing …
We build some iPhone app for biotech researchers:
– Laboratory Timer: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/laboratory-timer/id537195348?mt=8
– FastCounter: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fast-counter/id529461202?mt=8
As an Apple addict, are you interested in being invited for Plasmid.io private beta ? http://plasmid.io
I really think all of your feedbacks will be great for us!
Hi,
I a very impressed with the Fast Counter, I have some plates in the lab, will test it tomorrow.
I suscribed to Plasmid.io also, will test it when I get access !
Look like very good stuff …