Currently in classes where I teach the basics of tree building, we still fire up ancient iMacs, load up MacClade, and let the students have a play. Typically we give them the same data set and have a class competition to see which group can get the shortest tree by manually rearranging the branches. It’s fun, but the computers are old, and what’s nostalgic for me seems alien to the iPhone generation.

Prompted by a conversation with Vince Smith at the recent Online Taxonomy meeting at the Linnean Society in London I've been revisiting touch-based displays of large trees. There are a couple of really impressive examples of what can be done. Perceptive Pixel I've blogged about this before, but came across another video that better captures the excitement of touch-based navigation of a taxonomy.

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app. As before, this isn't a review of the app as such, I'm more interested in documenting how the app interface works, with a view to discovering if there are consistent metaphors we can use for navigating bibliographic databases.

Continuing the series of posts about reading scientific articles on the iPad, here are some quick notes on perhaps the most polished app I've seen, Papers for iPad. As with earlier posts on the Nature and PLoS apps, I'm not writing an in-depth review - rather I'm interested in the basic interface design. Papers is available for the Mac, as well as the iPhone and iPad.

There are a growing number of applications for viewing scientific articles coming out for the iPhone and iPad. I'm toying with extending the experiments described in an earlier post when I took the PLoS iPad app to task for being essentially a PDF page-turner, so I thought I should take a more detailed look at the currently available apps.