Presenting scientific data is often difficult. Not only do you have to get across complex ideas as simply and quickly as possible, you may also have a lot of data to get through. Anything, no matter how simple, that makes the transfer of information easier has to be a good thing. A few years ago I had to present the results of an experiment where I had mutated my gene of interest. One single position had been altered from the amino acid that was normally there to every other possible amino acid, and the effects of these changes were assayed. My slide had a simple bar graph, with 20 bars, one for each amino acid. As is normal, these were labelled at the bottom. It was a nightmare for me, and much worse for the audience that had to endure it. There was no easy way to take in the data at a single glance. You had to read the bar label and then see what the assay result was. Even colouring the bars to identify amino with similar physicochemical properties didn't really help.
Thinking about it afterwards, I had a brainwave. I had recently been playing around with Sequence Logos (see here for more information [LINK]) and wondered about replacing the bars with the appropriate letter to represent the amino acid. (For those of you not well versed in biochemistry, Wikipedia will tell you all you need to know!) The first graph was simply faked in PowerPoint, with appropriately scaled letters hiding the bars underneath. Being a hacker, of course, meant that I just had to have a go at writing a program to do the heavy lifting for me – a task made easier by my programs to make Sequence Logos that I had been working on.
The currentl version is very similar to the original. The only really difference (apart from the addition of a few bells and whistles that occurred to me when playing with the output) is an improvement in how the letters are displayed (using GDI+ rather than the more limited options native to BB4W). The most recent addition is the ability to include data for error bars.
I'm rather pleased with the final program, and it has been pretty useful. You can even see some of the results I mentioned in this rather fine publication.
You can download a ZIP file containing everything you need. The program does not need formal installation: simply unzip the program's folder in any location you like, and run it. User preferences are stored on a per-user basis in the Application Data folder. Your Registry will not be accessed in any way.
A NOTE ABOUT NORTON: The "advanced" heuristic algorithms used by Norton antivirus will flag this program as a high risk to your system, and the program will be removed. Sadly, the expense of digitally signing my software is simply too high, so you will have to take my word for it that this program will not harm your system in any way, or steal your identity to allow me to live the high life on some tropical paradise island surrounded by dusky maidens. You can safely retrieve it from Norton's Quarantine, and exclude it from future scans.
Source code available on request.
Please let me know what you think of this program – good or bad! Please also let me know if you encounter any bugs. Full details of what you were doing at the time will be helpful in tracking down the mistake and squashing it good and proper.
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How I wasted my teenage years!
Letter Graph
Make your graphs more meaningful...
Colour Check
A colour sampling tool.
2048
My take on the game that is sweeping the nation!
FRapp
A file rename utility.
Magnifiques
An old friend – the latest version of a program I started in the Eighties!
Textractor
A useful text extraction tool.
Tangler
A simple text reformatting tool.