Things are finally coming together, at least enough to have a functioning demo. It looks awful, but shows the main things I want BioNames to do. One thing I'm most concerned about at this stage is the possible confusion users might experience between taxon names and concepts.

Over the last few months I've been exploring different ways to view scientific articles on the iPad, summarised here. I've also made a few prototypes, either from scratch (such as my response to the PLoS iPad app) or using Sencha Touch (see Touching citations on the iPad). Today, it's time for something a little different. The Sencha Touch framework I used earlier is huge and wasn't easy to get my head around.

Yesterday, along with Chris Thorpe and Ian Mulvany I was involved in what I imagine might be the first of a series of demos of Wave as it could apply to scientists and researchers more generally. You can see the backup video I made in case we had no network on Viddler.

On Wednesday morning I had the distinct pleasure of seeing a group of students in the Computer Science department at the University of Toronto giving demos of tools and software that they have been developing over the past few months.

I've put the my Elsevier Challenge demo online. I'm still loading data into it, so it will grow over the next day or so. There's also the small matter of writing a paper on what's under the hood of the demo. Feel free to leave comments on the demo home page. For some example of what the project does, take a look at Mitochondrial paraphyly in a polymorphic poison frog species (Dendrobatidae;

Here is a live demo of Pygmybrowse using the Catalogue of Life classification of animals provided by GBIF. It's embedded in this post in an tag, so you can play with it. Just click on a node. Taxa in bold have ten or more children, the numbers of children are displayed in parentheses "()". Each subtree is fetched on the fly from GBIF.