As mentioned in previous posts, the MolSync site has had a major redesign under the hood, and now it has been followed up with an aesthetic re-skinning. The presentable web content was always presented as somewhat of a placeholder, since the main purpose of the site was to expose certain cheminformatics and data hosting capabilities, in particular to boost the functionality of various mobile apps. Now that it is evolving into a site that provides user-facing functionality as well, it is time for a little bit more attention to detail on the design front.

Most of what the site does is in the form of yet-to-be-documented API calls, and also a bunch of ad hoc data that was posted there for lack of a better place to put it (e.g. web version of Green Solvents). But since the site now exposes a new and nominally fully functional sketcher with molecule searching capabilities, this is now considered to be the feature to lead with on the splash page:

Other than minor style changes, the functionality is the same as it was last week, with similar spit’n’polish for various links:

There is still a great deal of work to do before the rate of new features settles down. As mentioned on the splash page, reaction searching is a priority. On another note, if you browse the site on a mobile device, you probably won’t be very impressed, especially if you try out the sketcher. This may seem incongruous from a company that chose to specialise in mobile, but the general plan is that interesting workflows on mobile will be done with native apps – not with a cross platform web UI. The primary purpose of the web-based functionality is to bring desktops into the fold. The mobile web experience will be largely non-interactive, because there’s already an app for that.