EleMints: Periodic Table

I’m beginning to think that my iPod rules my life. It’s already my main source of entertainment, and I spend a lot of hours glued to that little screen. But rarely has it encroached on one particular aspect of my life: school.

EleMints might be the app to change that. As the name suggests, EleMints deals with the elements—all of them. It’s essentially a super-charged periodic table app, with troves of data and a few extra functions wrapped up in a sleek, elegant interface. Other chemistry apps either give me too little information or are too clunky to justify using them instead of a paper periodic table, but EleMints is a gem.

The app opens to the main periodic table view. Pinching and zooming reveals normal details such as atomic number, mass, and structure; however, tapping on an element opens a pop-up profile on that specific element. Many, many properties are listed: atomic radius, electronegativity, the electron shell diagram, melting and boiling points, and more. There’s a lot of data here, and articles that the app pulls from the internet (from Wikipedia, mostly) provide more info still.

Perhaps most useful is the ability to sort elements. In the periodic table view, you can tap a rainbow-colored circle icon to change the color-coding, which colors each element based on relative boiling point, electronegativity, physical state, etc. This is great for discerning broad patterns (what? I forget them!). Meanwhile, under the Elements tab, there's a full list of "groups." Tapping on any given group will show you a full list of the elements, sorted by the selected property—so if you hit "Melting Point," for example, you'll get a list of every element listed by ascending melting points. There's also a Plot Graph tab, which makes trends across periods and groups more apparent.

The last feature I'd like to mention is EleMints' molar mass calculator. The calculator allows you to enter a chemical formula, and the app instantly gives you the molecule's molar mass as well as its percent composition.

Phew! Needless to say, there is a lot of information here. Thankfully, it's all easy to find and displayed in a slick, quick-loading interface. Landscape mode is fully supported along with portrait; I've never experienced a crash; everything is logically organized. Best of all, finding info is fast, so you can keep it by your elbow when working on chemistry problems and consult it quickly.

I couldn't ask for more from a periodic table app. EleMints is robust, efficient, and all-around awesome. Rarely has my iPod proven so utterly useful, and I'm insanely grateful to the developers for creating such a well-produced app. Do yourself a favor: if you're in chemistry now, buy it. You'll be grateful later.