April 1, 2015 (Vol. 35, No. 7)
URL:
Rating:
Strong Points: Easily graph fluorophore spectra, email pdf version
Weak Points: Can’t display filter sets
Platform:
iPad/iPhone/Android
Cost:
Free
Summary:
The Fluorescence Spectraviewer app by Invitrogen is a handy (albeit flawed) app that allows users to compare excitation/emission spectra for a large number of commonly used fluorophores. Users can select up to five fluorophores to display on a single graph, and can choose to graph excitation, emission, or both spectra for each. The graph displays nicely, with excitation spectra in dotted lines and emission spectra in solid lines. Users can email the resulting graph as a pdf. Unfortunately, the other feature of the app—selection and display of filter excitation/emission filter sets on the same graph—is currently nonfunctional. In the iPad version, an error states that the filter set is invalid, no matter what values are entered; and in the iPhone version, the app just crashes when you try to add a filter set. The app is still useful despite the filter set shortcoming, but it would certainly be more so if this bug were to be fixed.