Are you creating a chemistry mobile app or eBook? Are you using mobile technologies in chemical research or education settings? Do you have an interesting story to tell? If so, you’re invited to share your story at the Spring 2012 American Chemical Society Meeting in lovely San Diego, California.

Google Closure is a suite of tools for building scalable JavaScript software. I’ve used it in numerous projects with success. Closure’s biggest limitation is complexity. It can take thirty minutes or more just to get a new project set up and debugged. And if you’re new to Closure, that time can stretch into hours or days. My solution is Shoreline, a complete template for Closure projects. With it, you can: Create BDD-style tests using Jasmine.

The open Web offers a rich collection of diverse chemical data sources - if you know where to look. It’s been over four years since I wrote the previous post in this series describing some emerging chemical databases, and a lot has happened in this space. The time seems right for an update. Although some of the original databases are no longer active, it’s encouraging to see that a number of them continue to run and even prosper.

Video courtesy of The Ohio Supreme Court. For source documents, see the official American Chemical Society v. Leadscope record. For background presented earlier here, see: The ACS Versus Leadscope Case The story begins with three former Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) employees who leave to form their own software company - Leadscope. On being granted a U.S. patent for their software, Leadscope is sued by ACS.

Are you curious about WebGL and want to learn more? The Signals Blog, is running a series of tutorials on WebGL for Chemistry. The goal: build a 3D molecular viewer for the Web browser using WebGL and no plugins. Each lesson builds on the last one, leading - hopefully - to an MIT-licensed component suitable for further open- or closed-source development.

WebSpex was an idea for a 100% JavaScript spectroscopy and chromatography tool. At Metamolecular, we’ve been turning this basic concept into reality. Spex, our codename for this new software, is now capable of reading JCAMP-DX files and presenting them graphically within a Web browser - no plugins needed. Spex runs on all browsers we’ve tested, including IE6. The full story on Spex is available from the Signals blog.

It’s time to close a chapter on Depth-First and some of the other Web projects I’ve undertaken. In this post, I’ll explain why and what comes next. Depth-First’s first post appeared on August 12, 2006. The events that inspired that first post included the appearance of the public-facing PubChem and Zinc chemical structure databases. But there was more to it than that.

[Flash Content Scrubbed] Drugable.com is an early-stage, NLM-funded collaboration to build a web-based drug discovery platform. Closed beta is expected to begin in March of 2011. If you view the Web as the natural platform for collaboration in drug discovery, Drugable.com and projects like it will no doubt offer a wealth of lessons to learn from.

I’m happy to report that ChemWriter now runs without known issues on Chrome for Linux and Windows. As reported here previously, SVG on Chrome for Linux and Windows suffers from a known bug that prevents attachment of event listeners to SVG DOM elements under certain conditions. Fortunately, the bug was pinpointed and a simple XHTML file can be used to reproduce the behavior.

The growing trend toward chemical and biological laboratory automation has great potential to accelerate scientific discovery. But with this trend comes the need for better coordination among devices built by an increasingly large number of players and based on a bewildering array of specifications.

The idea of drug-likeness is pervasive in pharmaceutical research. Although it has its place, the concept can also be twisted to provide cover in the absence of other data. After all, what in the world does ‘drug-like’ actually mean? One place to look for meaning in the term ‘drug-like’ is with, well, drugs! Pharmaceutical sales figures, when combined with structural information, can provide valuable insights into drug-likeness.