relequestual/imvs

iMVS is an app for your iPhone that lets you view and rotate 3D models of proteins. Instead of looking at flat diagrams or chemical formulas, you can spin a protein around in your hand and see its actual structure, like holding a tiny molecular sculpture. It displays atoms as colored balls (using the standard CPK color scheme chemists use) and can show bonds between atoms as sticks connecting them together. The app works by taking protein data, the precise location and type of each atom, and rendering it as a 3D scene on your phone's screen using Apple's SceneKit graphics engine. When you load a protein, the app has to figure out which atoms are bonded to which other atoms, then draw those connections. It does this fairly efficiently by dividing space into a grid rather than checking every atom against every other atom, which would be slow. The creator built this primarily as a way to learn Apple's Swift programming language, not as a professional tool. It's based on similar molecular visualization software the author wrote back in 1999 using Java. If you're a chemistry student, researcher, or just curious about protein structures, you could use this to explore molecules on the go. Right now you can load a few proteins that come with the app, or add your own by providing protein data in the standard PDB format. The project is open source under an MIT license, meaning you can use and modify the code freely. The roadmap shows plans to improve it significantly, better performance when working with large molecules, the ability to download proteins directly from online databases instead of having them bundled with the app, fancier visualization modes like ribbon diagrams for showing secondary structures, and caching so proteins load faster on repeat visits. For now it's a learning project, but it has the foundation to become a more capable tool if the community contributes.