I've been racking my brains...

Nov 25, 2009 03:01



...trying to think of something to do as a side project (for CV enhancement/future small business possibilities)  which encompasses:
Web technology
UI design
Cheminformatics or bioinformatics
and has a unique selling point or solves a unique problem. In spare moments I have tried to jot down ideas, then ruling them out with searching - quite a few had already been done.
And then it hit me - chemical drawing.
For 2 and a half years this was the bane of my life when I worked at Evotec. We used a Java applet based system for web drawing which, while useful and feature-rich, was a pain in the hole for integrating seamlessly into web apps, users needed Java installed for WebStart, the configuration was a real bitch. There were desktop apps as well, but again these were Java based and had limitations.
What doesn't exist anywhere, to my knowledge, is a platform independent/agnostic, CSS based drawing tool which can also handle input files or SMILES strings and display them. With the CSS and javascript frameworks about, surely this would be achievable with a bit of work?
So basically, does anyone know of a tool/site like this where any user with just a decent web browser (think ChromeOS/Linux here) can rock up and just draw away? Or have I hit on something here?
Posted via email from paulbarrett's posterous
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