Friday afternoon bloglet.
Promega have released their Protocols and Applications Guide for the iPhone. This is so damned cool I might have to run off and download it.
Sounds perfect for the busy, gloved scientist —almost a shame I’m not one anymore.
When are you ever going to USE that? Or, for that matter, when am I ever going to use the Lab Timer application and Molecule Viewer applications that I downloaded?
Well, I can’t see me using it but I can see it might be very useful. And people are always asking me for protocols. Why, only last night I was in Tesco and someone cornered me, saying, “Mate, have you got a good nuclear extraction protocol?”
It would have been very useful — even more so if bluetooth worked and I could beam the protocol.
You are a scientist! You just don’t do experiments anymore 🙂
Yes, but he’s not gloved
Thanks for saying that, Ian – saved me having to.
That is kind of fun – but only Promega? Maybe this will set a trend and all of the manufacturers will jump on board.
I got really excited when I first glanced at this post because I thought you were saying that all of Current Protocols was available – now that would be very useful. No idea if it would fit on an iPhone though.
Ha ha!
I don’t see why all of CP wouldn’t fit: text is quite small, really (wouldn’t all of Shakespeare have fitted on a damn floppy, or something?).
I have the complete works of Shakespeare on my iPod. It’s a free app. It makes me look smart. Or it would, if anyone would ever bother to go through my pages and pages of applications.
So you can answer the question, Eva: how much space does it take up?
23.4 MB.
And it’s pretty readable (in landscape mode). I’m mugging up on R&J in advance of seeing it at The Globe next month. Ain’t I the culture vulture?
I don’t know how I can see that. iTunes only gives the total for all the apps. The app itself (which has pictures and features and all kinds of things that Shakespeare didn’t code) has an “about” section, but that doesn’t say it either. It’s this so you can go figure it out from there maybe.
Oh.
Stephen, how can you tell how big it is?
I used the Finder, Eva. Starting in your home folder on the Mac, go to Music > iTunes > Mobile Applications and there you should see listed all your downloaded applications (assuming that you have synched with the computer if you downloaded directly onto the iPhone or iPod touch).
how can you tell how big it is?
I say.
(tries to resist urge to make joke about synching it)
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
Serves me right for trying to raise the tone, I guess…
Sorry Stephen.
When good manners shall lie all in one or two man’s hands and they unwashed too, tis a foul thing
I love R&J – it is so shamelessly smutty.
Get thee to a nunnery.
Verily, you have redeemed yourself, my good lady. 😉
My comment was directed to Cath. Obviously.
I haven’t got to the smutty bits yet in my reading… will I have to wait as long as for Godot?
Smut is in the mind of the beholder. Which is why we didn’t read Henry V at school.
I’ve had the complete works of Shakespeare (and the Bible, and other such stuff) on my Palm for the last five years (and have read only a small fraction of either, naturally). But The Woman in White, and The Chronicles of Clovis, were worthy public-domain downloads, not to mention sundry science-fiction out there, all good plane reading and far lighter than the alternative.
Just saying that the iPhone is not the be-all and end-all… 😉 I’ll have to ask Promega to issue the stuff in plain text.
Is there a way of reading plain text documents on the iPhone? I guess there must be an application somewhere, but I haven’t looked.
Now might be a good time to remind people of the Gutenberg Project.
Hm, yes, Gutenberg is full of things (including many impenetrable works by a certain Charles Darwin, some of which I waffled about in more-than-great-length earlier this year).
But – I’m going to have to download the Shakespoke – at 23.4 Mb, it’ll fit beautifully on my nano, presuming the nano’s OS is up to the task of dealing with it. So thanks for the tip.
Update – apparently, I know pants about iPods (surprise, surprise) – it’s an app, and nanos don’t do apps.
Hm – I wonder if they display plain text…
Don’t know about nanos but iPods proper have a ‘notes’ function that displays plain text.
Update: I’ve found a decent FTP application, and have managed to get Gravity’s Rainbow onto it. \o/
FTP – 🙂
Does it run linux? Can you run EMBOSS on it?
Just wondering.
It probably doesn’t want to run Linux because it runs Unix (it’s MacOS X) so if you jailbroke it you probably could run EMBOSS.
Hmm….
Update (in case anyone cares) – apparently nanos do “notes” as well. I will give it a try with something from this excellent site – NB this looks excellent, has many, many different download formats available (and online reading as well).
I care, Richard.
And I’d like to point out http://www.scribd.com/, which has Gravity’s Rainbow, among other things, in a variety of formats too. I’m reading the plain text version (although have the PDF and Word docs) using an application called ‘Files lite’.
I was able to get a .doc file into Stanza which has a desktop application and a nice reader on the iPhone: slick page turing and bookmarking.
I tried Stanza but it requires the desktop client and I’m still without home internets.
Sbribd looks a little chaotic, but perhaps worth digging through? My first few minutes resulted in turning up lots of letters, manuals for Nintendo game controllers, and the like (while looking for other things).
Interesting though.
Scribd is cool. Try GR.
I shall now lower the tone by saying I’m now addicted to Spore Origins for iPhone. What better app even exists for an evolutionary biologist?
Oh you bastard, Henry. Exactly the kind of thing I don’t need right now.
Damn you damn you damn you…
tee hee hee
I shall be good and wait for Mallorn…
You do that. Be patient.
By the way, I’d like to plead that people don’t use Scribd. They tend to
piratenickupload copyrighted material without permission, and when this is pointed out to them, they act all prim and legalistic, making the effort of taking down material so demanding of time, resources and patience that most people just give up. Which is what they’re hoping, I guess. Now, you might well be an advocate of open-access publishing, but from the point of view of many authors trying to earn a living, and the people who publish them, there’s another word for it – *theft*.Do they now? If that’s right then I agree completely.
Yes, they do. Now, if only I can break Spore Origins at the 11th level. It’s the big grey centipedes you have to avoid: and those spiky things with goggly eyes.
The spiky things with goggle eyes are what drove me from the practising of science. SRSLY.
Henry, can Spore run as a stand-alone on the iPhone, or do you need to buy the main game for it to work?
Right, that’s it for Scribd, and thanks for the warning, Henry.
Fortunately I am immune to Spore-thingy as my
lamecute little Nano won’t run it.RPG – Gravity’s Rainbow looks absolutely awful, and it’s 576 pages long. I may pass.
Spore is a humungous program that makes even quite powerful computers wilt. Spore Origins for iPhone is a completely separate stand-alone game that doesn’t require Spore on a computer- but is itself quite demanding of the iPhone’s native power.
I am, strangely perhaps, quite taken with Gravity’s Rainbow so far.
I’m embarrassed to say that I let my 12-year-old son finish Spore. Origins sounds like a great thing to have on a phone, though. Better than that sloshing beer, in any case.
When did I sign up for Scribd? but I do seem to have done. I’d been meaning to read GR sometime in my life. How is it much worse than Richard telling me I could check it out from the public library once he had returned it? (I’m unlikely to have purchased it at this late date.) And yet I am sensitive to the whole point of copyright in protecting creators. So I’m a bit torn. At least a library did purchase a book once, and its distribution is more limited than something uploaded without an author’s permission on a website.
I can only imagine the massive headache I’d get from reading Gravity’s Rainbow on an iPhone. Give me my well-worn paperback edition and a hammock.
Hammock is difficult on a phone.
(_Why_ won’t Vista stop my device ‘Generic Volume’? I don’t want to try again later, I want it now.)
‘phone’. I meant the Tube. Damn this silly computer.
Hint to RPG – ignore the “won’t stop device Generic Volume” message and just unplug the thing.
I can confirm that the “notes” function on the Nano truncates text files (I haven’t bothered to determine at what point/file size, but I suspect it’s some nice round power of two). Which I probably could have found out from teh intarwebs if I’d looked.
I guess I’m doomed to downloading, printing and reading, still – unless I crack open the laptop on the train. Ah well.
Yah, I went for that at finish. Makes me wince though, unplugging without unmounting.
Makes me wince though, unplugging without unmounting
SPLORT
Slow today, aren’t we?
Some of us do work between monitoring Nature Network posts, you know…
We do?