Molecules – iPad App of the Week

Molecules is an application for viewing three-dimensional renderings of molecules and manipulating them using your fingers. You can rotate the molecules by moving your finger across the display, zoom in or out by using two-finger pinch gestures, or pan the molecule by moving two fingers across the screen at once. Double-tapping on the display lets you switch visualization modes.

New molecules can be downloaded from the RCSB Protein Data Bank (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb), an international repository of biological molecules and their 3-D structures. Molecules can be downloaded directly to your iPhone or iPod touch and stored there for later viewing.

Custom molecular structures can also be downloaded to the device from any publicly available web server. The location of these structures can either be manually specified in the application or custom URLs can be clicked on within Safari or Mail on the device. For more details, please visit our website.

Molecules is a BSD-licensed open source project.

This week’s App is Molecules.

Free

I downloaded this app originally for the iPhone and it obviously still works on that, however since they made it an universal app and it now is native to the iPad, I think it is now more useful and interesting.

Now I am no bio-chemist so I have no real idea if it is useful and interesting from a learning perspective. However it is clever use of the iPad interface and I suspect it could be useful and interesting.