I'm really getting into learning Ableton Live, it's got the most amazing user interface I've ever seen.
One of my favorites is that you can switch between Arangement View and Clip View with just the TAB key. I was thinking that would be fantastic for coot, you could switch between your electron density maps and reciprocal space data with the TAB key. I'm not sure how useful that would be to actual crystallographers, but it would be an amazing teaching tool, to get people more aware of the actual data that is going into their structure determination process.
Something that would probably be more useful would be to have the TAB key switch between the 3D view of your proteins, and a sequence alignment viewer.
That's one big problem with both crystallographers and people working in genomics, crystallographers often just think about the one protein in 3D, and genomics researchers think about a whole bunch of sequence, without relating it to the 3D proteins. The next wave will be to combine the two of these, combining traditional genomics with structural genomics in an application on scientists desktops. This application would be totally web aware, it would seamlessly allow you to query databases all over the world right inside your 3D/genomics application.
And it wouldn't be within your browser, that works great for some applications, but for hardcore researchers, it just doesn't cut it, it won't be within your browser, but it will connect to the web, just like a browser.
That's the new direction. I would do that right now, but it's going to take a big team to do it, and I just don't think that there is any way to actually make a living doing it, unless you are a researcher at a university or genomics lab with people who know how to do hardcore coding for Linux, Windows and MacOSX. It will happen someday, and it's gonna rock.
