Geneious

4.0 stars

"realiy handy for revision. brill!"

May 2, 2006  |   By robbiehay1

Version: Geneious 1

Pros

brill!!!!!!!!

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5.0 stars

"A geneious at searching?"

May 1, 2006  |   By revel--2008

Version: Geneious 1.0

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Geneious is a Java programmed, read platform-independent, interface to the scientific databases of the web, and a tool for analysing that data once it has been retrieved to a local database of 'interesting' files.

I have been using Geneious since early in the beta testing phase of development, and have downloaded each new update as it was released. During that time I have seen major developments to the power, features and stability of the software, and I am impressed with Version 1.0. The developers have been uniformly excellent in their responses to bug reports and ideas/ suggestions for both the interface and feature set. I think that this has been key to the quality of the Version 1.0 release.

The user interface of the Geneious software is very friendly and intuitive. Its generally uncluttered styling is a nice change from some other software I could mention and the customisable appearance is a nice touch. The use of the left hand pane to display collapsible directory trees for both the local database and the online databases is good too.

I wonâ??t review all of the features in Geneious here as they are wide ranging in their application to research and in some cases outside my direct field of expertise. In particular I am not an expert in sequence alignment and tree building. Having said that, using the Geneious interface I was able to quickly and easily create alignments and build phylogenetic trees. Itâ??s just that I couldnâ??t give an expert opinion on just how well they really work.

The software currently interfaces very well with the NCBI website database and retains much of that sites functionality in terms of searching out data. However, Geneious goes well beyond NCBI in some respects. The most important of which is the use the â??Agentsâ??. These are automated searches that, once setup, keep an eye on the NCBI database in the background and retrieve any new matching documents. This is a great innovation that saves a great deal time. Now if I could only have Geneious also work out the appropriate terms for my searches as well I could take up Golf.

I have mainly used Geneious to manage my searches for references, and to search for all the members of a particular superfamily of genes. This is now working very well. Only my choice of search terms really held things up to begin with anyway. I recommend Geneious in its current form and can only imagine that the software will continue to improve rapidly that the request of its users.

PS I have rated the support/ documentation as n/a because I never looked at it - didn't need to. But like a said eariler the response from the development team, to emails and forum posts, was excellent.

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