Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
findingsapp.com
Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#2Looks really cool. How do you simulate the permanence that paper laboratory notebooks have? I was always trained to write out everything, and if I ended up not using a particular procedure, striking it out so it was obvious it wasn't used but could be read by a third party whenever necessary (for legal reasons).
There's always the honor code, but my understanding was the lack of paper trail is one of the big issues with switching to computational means for keeping track of scientific results.
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#3Looks really cool. How do you simulate the permanence that paper laboratory notebooks have? I was always trained to write out everything, and if I ended up not using a particular procedure, striking it out so it was obvious it wasn't used but could be read by a third party whenever necessary (for legal reasons). There's always the honor code, but my understanding was the lack of paper trail is one of the big issues w…
I'm not sure if this is what they do, but it seems like a solution would be the git commit hashing procedure. So at the end of a day/worksession have the app take the hash of ( what you entered today + yesterday's hash) so you create a provable trail of changes.
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#4Makes no sense to do this as anything but a web app, IMO. Certainly not as a Mac-specific native app.
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#5How do they avoid lock-in? The site makes no mention of the concept whatsoever, and I don't see anything about an ability to export, in a non-bespoke form, all the data you've painstakingly collected in Findings.
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#6How do they avoid lock-in? The site makes no mention of the concept whatsoever, and I don't see anything about an ability to export, in a non-bespoke form, all the data you've painstakingly collected in Findings.
Looks like they'll be adding export soon: "Can I print, export, share an experiment or a protocol? The initial version of Findings has not implemented these features, but it is coming very soon. Most of the implementation is ready, but it requires a bit more work for integration, and it was not done on time for the 1.0 release. Our apologies for the delay! But please let us know what you need, so we'll do our best to include it."
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#7How do they avoid lock-in? The site makes no mention of the concept whatsoever, and I don't see anything about an ability to export, in a non-bespoke form, all the data you've painstakingly collected in Findings.
We definitely want to make sure you can always export your data. At this stage, you have of course to take our word for it, since we do not have export working yet. However, we also have a section in our intial user guide about the format used to store those documents. It is SQLite-based, and is a simple key-value store (using the open-source PARStore implementation). Also, it's not store "in the cloud", it is on your local hard drive, and you can easily get to that library via the preferences of the app.
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#8Makes no sense to do this as anything but a web app, IMO. Certainly not as a Mac-specific native app.
Sorry to bring up the whole native vs web app debate, but this kind of app is actually a good fit for a native app: access to files, very specific workflows requiring fine-tuned user interface and user experience. Not impossible to do in a web app, but much harder to do right, particularly when your main competitor is a paper notebook that has so much flexibility and is so easy to use.
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#9Looks really cool. How do you simulate the permanence that paper laboratory notebooks have? I was always trained to write out everything, and if I ended up not using a particular procedure, striking it out so it was obvious it wasn't used but could be read by a third party whenever necessary (for legal reasons). There's always the honor code, but my understanding was the lack of paper trail is one of the big issues w…
I'm not sure if this is what they do, but it seems like a solution would be the git commit hashing procedure. So at the end of a day/worksession have the app take the hash of ( what you entered today + yesterday's hash) so you create a provable trail of changes.
Good idea, and no, we don't have anything like that at the moment.
Re: Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented
#10Looks really cool. How do you simulate the permanence that paper laboratory notebooks have? I was always trained to write out everything, and if I ended up not using a particular procedure, striking it out so it was obvious it wasn't used but could be read by a third party whenever necessary (for legal reasons). There's always the honor code, but my understanding was the lack of paper trail is one of the big issues w…
I'm not sure if this is what they do, but it seems like a solution would be the git commit hashing procedure. So at the end of a day/worksession have the app take the hash of ( what you entered today + yesterday's hash) so you create a provable trail of changes.
I'm not sure I see why hashing is necessary nor why it provides any "proof" of what was changed. Perhaps it's the git analogy that's tripping me up because you can easily forge commits to appear as being from any user at any time.