Galaxy screencasts with BioScreencasts.com
Biologists don't like to read manuals. Of course, some things are obvious: 99% of us will not dry out pets in a microwave. Yet some biological procedures require minimal guidance. Galaxy team was providing this guidance using exciting new mechanism called ScreenCasts. Our friends at http://www.bioscreencasts.com made this even easier by providing a cross-browser (those of us who tried to design IE-safe interfaces know what this means) streaming server. From now on in addition to the familiar Download link you will notice a Stream link, which will be served through bioscreencasts.com. So start streaming...
Updated on 08/08/07 15:49:37
Web User Interfaces Updates
Over the last few weeks we've rolled out some improvements to the Galaxy user interface.
Style: We've updated the overall style of the main Galaxy. The new style simplifies many elements (for example, the "hatched" backgrounds have been removed since the cause readability problems on some displays). The new style is also slightly more compact, making better use of the available space. The history styles now support nested datasets much better. The new style also looks much more consistent across browsers (in particular, some display issues on Internet Explorer have been fixed).
Javascript: All Javascript in the Galaxy user interface is now using jQuery (we previously depended on both prototype and dojo). More importantly, we now use progressive enhancement to add all of the Javascript features, so that Galaxy should be completely usable in a browser without Javascript.
Interface panels: The interface no longer uses HTML framesets, the panels are CSS positioned elements containing iframes. This allows us more flexibility in how they are styled and how they can be interacted with. The new interface supports both resizing and hiding/showing panels. Furthermore, tools can provide a "size hint" to indicate a desired pixel width for display, and the Galaxy interface will attempt to honor this by hiding the history panel. This greatly improves our integration with external sites that look better with a wider display area (e.g. UCSC table browser and Biomart).
Download size/speed: We have greatly reduced the amount of Javascript code needed to run Galaxy, as well as using gzip on static content and caching more aggressively, so that Galaxy is now much more usable on slower connections.
Tool interface forms: The tool interfaces now display labels above the input fields rather than to the left. Some experiments suggest that laying out forms in this way is substantially easier to read. Additionally, there is less constraint on how long a field label should be, so tool authors are now be able to use longer labels (when unnecessary to communicate more clearly). Note: this feature is currently still on Galaxy test.
We would appreciate feedback on all of these changes. For local Galaxy interfaces note that you can use the new layout and the new style independently. Also, your old custom styles will work fine (although I have added some CSS rules, if you are generating a style with 'make_style.py' you should just be able to regenerate and everything should work).
BOSC/ISMB 2007
Galaxy made some appearances in Vienna last week, with James giving a technical overview talk for BOSC and Anton and James giving two live demos on using the Galaxy web interface and installing local Galaxy instances with custom tools. Thanks to everyone who came, hopefully it was useful and showed you how Galaxy can make your life easier. If you missed it, you can of course always have your own private demo thanks to our ScreenCasts.
We'll next be venturing out for ASHG 2007 where we will be joined by Ross Lazarus to again present two sessions, one for users / biologists and one for developers / service providers. Both will highlight our new toolset for genome-scale statistical genetics (which we are very excited about). Hope to see you there, cheers!
Updated on 08/03/07 11:05:25
Multiple whole genome alignments are as critical for biology as air is to aerobic forms of life: comparative and functional genomics simply cannot be done without the alignments. Yet because multiple alignments are so big and exist in a specialized format, they cannot be used by the majority of biologists, who would otherwise benefit from them. Galaxy is the only resource allowing interactive large scale analyses to be performed on the alignments directly from your browser.
Today Galaxy contains a set of 11 tools designed to convert formats of multiple alignments, filter them, as well as extract and stitch alignment blocks corresponding to genomic coordinates
Updated on 07/20/07 13:32:11
Blog Test
This is a test of the blog hack.
Galaxy
