Things have been a little quiet on this blog lately, as well as the Molecular Materials Informatics website, and indeed in the secret laboratory: and there is a perfectly good explanation for that – I’ve been away. For the last few months I’ve been quietly roosting in San Francisco, working on an interesting and exciting project at the bay area HQ of Collaborative Drug Discovery. Not wanting to put out any spoilers, but the beans will be spilled very soon via PeerJ, which should be releasing a paper with my name on it very soon indeed.

I left San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, which unfortunately means I didn’t get to attend the ACS meeting that many of you are heading towards right about now, but there is a perfectly good explanation for that, too: at the end of last month, I turned 40, and decided to celebrate this milestone by returning to my home country of New Zealand, which I have not been back to for a long time. It was a delightful trip, albeit too short: after having been away from my normal home (in Montreal) for more than 4 months, the things-to-do list was piling up quite high, as it tends to do.

Now that things are back to normal (or will be once the jetlag and travel fatigue wears off), you should expect to see a lot of action on the Molecular Materials Informatics front. The Valence app was released recently in its 1.0 form, and it will evolve rapidly over the next few months. The perenially nearly finished Green Lab Notebook app really is nearly finished (honestly!) and should be ready for submission in the next few weeks. There is a new paper out describing the TB Mobile v2 app, and some of the technology that my company built on behalf of Collaborative Drug Discovery, which really does push a few boundaries quite nicely. Also, the Royal Society of Chemistry has commissioned an update to the ChemSpider Mobile app, and I have been working on a total redesign of the user experience, which is making solid progress. The original app was quite simple, but it is also rather popular, so building out the feature set and refining the quality makes nothing but good sense.

In addition to these things, I have a million other ideas that have been accumulating and/or thrown on the backburner. The last year and a half has involved a lot of distractions (where distraction is defined as anything that takes precedence over sitting down on my command throne and building cool new products), but the rest of this year will hopefully be dedicated almost exclusively to doing what I enjoy the most: creating stuff.