Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!bionet!turbo.bio.net!lear From: lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank Subject: Re: Genbank Search from networked Macs Message-ID: Date: 31 Oct 90 00:51:12 GMT References: <7243@cica.cica.indiana.edu> Organization: GenBank Computing Resource for Mol. Biology Lines: 36 Dave Kristofferson asked me to take a look at your stack, and I found it to be quite nicely done. I'd like to applaud your efforts to improve on the user interface to SEARCH and RETRIEVE. One accesses the GenBank stack as one would any other - by either double clicking on the file, or by jumping to it from Hypercard. The stack then presents you with an introductory display, which is made up of clips from an actual fasta run, I presume. This display also has the author information in it. After a click, a table of contents is presented. The user may access either SEARCH or RETRIEVE from this stack, and it will take data from either a file, or a data card. After collecting all the relevant information, the stack uses XCMDs to talk to MacTCP to communicate with GenBank. The communication, as envisioned by Gilbert, is most amusing to watch. GenBank, pictured as a gargantuan roman building, accepts a beam of light from my little Mac, and the SMTP transaction is mimicked. The results were then processed and returned by GenBank to an account that I specified in the Hypercard stack. Over all, a very nice veneer for the mail system. The one enhancement I would love to see over time would be for the Mac to wait for results from GenBank, and then present them to the user. That's no small task, though. There was one bug in the stack - apparently it only works properly on a Mac II because of the screen size. I don't think this would be a problem if there is a command to turn off the menu bar in Hypertalk. -- Eliot Lear [lear@turbo.bio.net]