DISQUS

It would be a good idea. I have always thought that there should be some sort of PDB-"metadata" kind of website, where computational experiments done on whatever PDB structure could be associated to the original model... for example solvated systems, drug docking studies, mutagenesis....

I think that there needs to be some sort of open scientific data tracker (may or may not host the data itself) that can be used by anybody. Something like that would allow data to be verified by some sort of signature, and signed by scientists (by pgp or something), etc...
It could have an API for applications that manage the data...
Does something like that exist? What are your thoughts?

It really isn't as bad as you think. I agree with you that writing apps should be "easier", but then again Objective C is basically C and C is basically hard :)

The thing with Cocoa (and especially with Core Data) is that it really isn't that "hard" to make a beautifully looking and fully functional application. I would suggest to you to check out some Core Data tutorials on Apple's site and others... I just started using Obj-c/Cocoa/Core Data a month ago and it took a couple of days for me to prototype my app's interface and have full undo/redo as well as open/save functionality... without having to write more than a few (maybe 20-30) lines of code.

I agree that some things should be easier in Obj-C, especially for data analysis, parsing, etc... but I think the whole app design framework was made to be able to design the interface easily and have full control over the back-end code.

I guess if you are only talking about pure command line apps then I can understand your complaints... but then again, just use perl/ruby/python for that stuff.