I think that anything that will make use of the touch screen to explore datasets will be great. One of the most common problems in bioinformatics is having to navigate huge genomic regions, multiple alignments, etc.., and this is much easier to do with a touchscreen than with a mouse.

So, a few suggestions:

• a simple interface to the UCSC browser to navigate genomic regions.
• a tool to edit multiple alignments using the touchscreen. You can take inspiration from jalview, seaview and the others.

Take into account that I am not sure if there are already existing applications for doing these tasks. You should make a search first.

Some sort of sample information tracking with entry/management on the phone.

Fundamentally the problem is that each lab has its own protocols and methods - this often makes using a big LIMS unwieldy. What would be great is a system that would allow people to design the fields for each protocol then save/exchange records easily via a centralized server.

This should be done while teamed up with a larger lab not just on your own and while continuously evaluating how it works in practice.

Thanks for the reply.

An interface to UCSC might be a bit ambitious for my first app! (and as far as I know there's no public API/webservice to access the track data). I know that JBrowse is very useable with a touch interface so there might not be a point in me reinventing the wheel for that.

Your multiple alignment idea sounds good - I'll have a think about it.

Here are a few other ideas I've had:

• Something useful for the "web lab" people so that they can use the app on the bench instead of a piece of paper and calculator i.e. calculating concentrations or some other routine task they commonly do? (I'm not a wet lab person myself so don't know what is a common task for them)
• Pubmed interface/search
• NCBI access - download/lookup sequences, genes etc then do something with it - i.e. BLAST

If anyone has any comments/can develop any ideas further then I'd love to have their input...