[Omaha.pm] Fishing for GUI ideas...

[Jay Hannah]

On Dec 3, 2008, at 5:41 AM, Rob Townley wrote:
> Viral, Bacterial and ¿ribosomal? dna are usually in a circle.
> Normal human, but not mitochondrial DNA is a line.
> When i did research, most molecular biologists were only interested in
> circular dna because anything else was too big.  Of course the human
> genetic code has been broken since then.  It may not matter at all to
> your users...

Ya. Whether or not they were looking at circular DNA our GUI would  
flatten it (as many tools do).

> When i taught C++, a geneticist and i toyed with a circular rna
> explorer like interface using a cross platform gui toolkit application
> for the Mac and Windows.

Oh? Did it survive? What's the name of that project?

> On a tangent, i was wondering if svg could make it easier to do a
> circle.   Scalable Vector Graphics defined in XML, maybe too much
> data.
> Or, using svg to make a line like interface similar to a disk  
> defragging gui.

Well, sidestepping the whole circular thing is my plan, so I don't  
have to deal with it. I'd be very impressed if any SVG renderer could  
scale up to thousands of base pairs without choking horribly.  :)

Status update: Mario added an Javascripty (almost AJAXy) scroll bar  
to our tool:

http://clab.ist.unomaha.edu/CLAB/index.php/RT386

j