One of the challenges of creating apps for mobile devices is making functionality available via the user interface and the limited real estate. The UI of the mobile molecular data sheet (MMDS) has been updated to addresses a minor but persistent inconvenience: previously, the main command bank had to be open in order to exit from any of the editor panels.

There is a listing of mobile science apps here.

It has now been a couple of years since the human genome was first sequenced and we are now seeing companies offering personal genome sequencing. Illumina are now offering MyGenome an iPad app that allows you to explore a real human genome. In due course they hope to allow you to explore your own genome.

There is more information about the app here.

Now added to the mobile science page.

Reagents, This application details the structures and functions of >80 reagents encountered in typical introductory organic chemistry courses.

The Mobile Molecular DataSheet (MMDS) has been updated. Two major usability enhancements:

(1) Additional tool banks on the left and right side of the sketcher provide simplified drawing tools that are more familiar to users of desktop chemical drawing software.

(2) A tooltip system provides tips, live demonstrations and links to documentation.

I’ve just added Brain Lab to the list of mobile science applications Brain Lab is a brain cell simulator, currently it offers

1. A passive integrate and fire model
2. A full Hodgkin-Huxley model with sodium and potassium channels
3. A Library to learn more about brain science

Brain Lab offers real scientific brain cell models that can be used by anyone, no matter if you are a student, a scientist, or someone who is just interested in brain science. To carry out your experiments, they have set up a Lab for you with all the necessary equipment. If you need to brush up your brain science knowledge or look up a specific technical term, you can go to your Library and read it up. 

The Open Drug Discovery Teams (ODDT) project is a mobile app primarily intended as a research topic aggregator of open science data integrated from various sources on the internet. It exists to facilitate interdisciplinary teamwork and to relieve the user from data overload. Initial research topics include areas of chemistry and adjacent molecule-oriented biomedical sciences, with an emphasis on those which are most amenable to open research at present. The ODDT project uses a free mobile app for iOS-based devices (iPhone, iPod and iPad) as the hub. The app has a Flipboard-inspired interface, and serverside infrastructure for hosting data and value added services. The project is open to participation from anyone, and much of the content is derived from public sources but is amenable to commercial data input and they are now looking for alpha testers. One of the key components is a back-end server that is in charge of monitoring the appearance of tweets with certain hash tags (#tuberculosis, #malaria, #hivaids, #huntingtons, #sanfilipposyndrome and #greenchemistry).

There is a screencast here to give you an idea of the functionality.

A chart & graph library for iOS and Mac OS X developers.

• Fully native Objective-C library for direct, easy use in any iOS XCode project.
• Several samples and demo projects to make integration and getting started a snap.
• Over 50 powerful graph types, including bar, line, area, pie, scatter, bubble and waterfall.
• An easy-to-use yet powerful object oriented API gives you full control over your charts with a minimum of effort.
• Real 3D graphs with controls to zoom, pan, rotate and skew!
• Adjust and control every element on every chart. Multiple Y-axis, depth effects, reference lines, scale controls and much more.
• The full power of the PGSDK (charting library of choice for MicroStrategy, IBM/Cognos and many more) now for your mobile application!

iFormulas is a clean, simple, easy to use mathematical formula reference guide. Formulas : Algebra, Calculus, Chemistry, Geometry and Trigonometry. Over 380 formulas, definitions, laws, properties, etc.

MyCalculator is an innovative 2D and 3D graphing calculator featuring One Touch Graphing™ and an innovative memory system to store and recall answers. Just touch the answer bar to store numbers in multiple memory slots.

MathStudio, formerly SpaceTime, is the most comprehensive math app available for iPhone and iPad. Whether you need a simple calculator to do your finances or a replacement for your TI graphing calculator,

MolPrime is a chemical structure drawing tool based on the unique sketcher from the Mobile Molecular DataSheet

Added to the Mobile Science Page.

CMol is a molecular viewer designed specifically for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, offering a more powerful system for displaying and understanding biological molecules than has yet been seen on any iOS device.

There are many more applications on the mobile science page.

The Mobile Molecular DataSheet (MMDS) v1.3.7 has had a bit of attention to the sketching interface, and now makes available the most commonly used small ring templates from the context menu:

There is a page of mobile apps for science here

RSC Mobile is a mobile app which provides up-to-the-minute access to RSC journals. Full text HTML and PDF access via wireless networks for subscribing institutions/organisations. The latest news from the RSC Publishing Platform. Ability to save articles for offline reading - and to save the abstract for articles where the reader doesn't have full text access. Sharing of content via email, Twitter or Facebook.

There is a page of mobile apps for science here

Are you fed up by the number of times you visit a web page and find you don’t have the plugin/applet to view the content? Or lost count of the times you have to update because of plugin security updates or applet java versions. Well you might like this post from iChemLabs. They have a demo of WebGL running on a mobile device.

“We recently started optimizing our 3D ChemDoodle Web Components for mobile browsers, and will be fully supporting WebGL on all mobile platforms that implement it. This will allow scientists to quickly and affordably use the web to reach large numbers of users to reduce the cost of education and further spread science, especially when using the open-source and free ChemDoodle Web Components library. We already have the 3D components running on iOS and Android devices”

Mobile hardware and software technology continues to evolve very rapidly and presents drug discovery scientists with new platforms for accessing data and performing data analysis. Smartphones and tablet computers can now be used to perform many of the operations previously addressed by laptops or desktop computers. Although the smaller screen sizes and requirements for touch-screen manipulation can present user-interface design challenges, especially with chemistry-related applications, these limitations are driving innovative solutions. In this early review of the topic, we collectively present our diverse experiences as software developer, chemistry database expert and naïve user, in terms of what mobile platforms could provide to the drug discovery chemist in the way of applications in the future as this disruptive technology takes off.