[Bioperl-l] Deobfuscator interface now available

Amir Karger akarger at CGR.Harvard.edu
Mon May 15 12:20:11 UTC 2006


This tool is quite nice, and may save me a lot of perdoc'ing.

A couple of minor interface thoughts. 

1)There's quite a lot of methods for many of the classes. As such, I
think I'll often want to browse through what's available in a class. But
60% or so of the screen real estate is used for "Enter a search
string... OR select a class from the list". IMO, it would be better to
have two pages, a search page and a result page.   It only takes a click
on Back (or a "new search" button) to get to a new search, and now you
can use your whole screen for reading your results.

2) Please sort the "select a class from the list" alphabetically. I
guess I can enter a search term to get the right classes, but it would
be nice to be able to browse.
2a) if you want to be really fancy, make a javascript nested menu with
expandable submenus. OK, maybe not.

3) Minimalist is nice, but documentation is even nicer. It wasn't clear
to me that the search searches within class names rather than function
names. What I really want to know sometimes is which module has, say,
the revcom method in it. So, if it's not easy to include that within
this search, then at least tell me what my search space is.

4) When I search for something that's not found, I get a screen that
looks pretty familiar, with the extra text "No match to string found"
down at the bottom. It took me a while to even notice it. (Studies show
that most users don't read most of the text on a page.) Bold might be
nice here. Or put the error at the top of the screen. Or both.

5) I'll save my stupidest comment for last - please make the page title
"Bioperl Deobfuscator", so that when I bookmark it I'll know what the
bookmark stands for.

Thanks, Laura Kavanaugh and David Messina, for a neat AND useful tool.

- Amir Karger
Computational Biology Group
Bauer Center for Genomics Research
Harvard University
617-496-0626





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