Recently I was talking to a colleague at a chemistry conference exposition area about what I was up to at Metamolecular. The subject of ChemWriter came up, so I whipped out my iPad and started showing him how it worked. Within thirty seconds, a man who I didn’t know broke into our conversation to excitedly ask where he could buy the application I was using and tell me how much he wants to be able to use his iPad to draw structures for his work. I’ve had similar experiences since then when demoing ChemWriter to chemists.

If you’ve ever used ChemDraw or another structure drawing tool before and are curious about how structure drawing could work with a touch interface on your tablet device, I have a site you might be interested in:

The ChemWriter on iPad and Android Test Page

There’s No App For That - Yet

What I ended up telling the man was that ChemWriter isn’t an app - it’s a software component licensed to developers who build web applications for chemists. He stared at me in bewilderment. Other chemists since then have reacted the same way, and understandably so. The conversation has repeated itself enough times that I now view this as evidence I was missing something important, namely a series of product ideas that don’t yet exist but which might be useful.

Ideas are nice, but feedback from potential users is way better. So if you’re a tablet user and chemist looking for ‘an app for that’, please feel free to leave a comment below or drop me a line.