Today I spent the first half of my day working on the GenomeSearch Android app, and the second half of the day tieing up loose ends with my old bbhFinder perl script.

I still need to verify the correctness of the last bit of bbhFinder at some point, but beyond that I’ve coded everything I set out to. I’m thinking of shifting my focus to the Android development for the summer, as I’ve been working on bbhFinder for over a full semester at this point. The Android development is also looking very promising at the moment, and satisfies the cell phone grant!

I thought I would make a few notes for either myself or anyone who works on bbhFinder (or related projects) in the future. Here are a few areas where I think the project could be improved:

As it stands, bbhFinder has several features, and a number of output files. These are currently all performed every time the script is run, which would likely lead to more work being done than a user cares about in a given sitting. This could be done better if bbhFinder asked the user which features they would like performed.

To achieve this, a simple GUI could be implemented which would have checkboxes for each feature, and a ‘Run’ button to perform all options checked. Further, the code could be broken up and organized a bit better, such that the main method is simply if(option1IsChecked){perform method 1} and so on. This would also increase readability of the code, which never hurts!

As for GenomeSearch, I finally got the spinner working today, and it shows every genome that the drop-down box in the opensocial app does!