bioGUI

Bioinformatics is a highly interdisciplinary field, still most applications are command line applications. Mostly our non-computer affine colleagues, the actual domain experts, can well interpret results from such tools, because GUI applications are available, but struggle from starting the tool itself as there is no user interface they can understand or as their computer can not handle POSIX-/UNIX programs. We thus would like to present bioGUI to address these two major problems we see in interdisciplinary work.

bioGUI is a universal Graphical User Interface (GUI) for command-line applications making use of Window's newest feature: Windows Subsystem for Linux, which provides a native Ubuntu bash in Windows. A bioGUI template can easily be scripted from several constructs, including LUA scripts, and can also allow to install dependencies, the application and the GUI template itself with only two clicks. bioGUI then constructs the required arguments from the GUI and executes the program.

Quick Start

Download bioGUI for your platform and place it to some location. In Windows, do not place bioGUI into your Program Files folders, as these are protected by Windows.

After starting bioGUI, you can Download templates from the webserver. How to download templates, install software and setup Windows Subsystem for Linux is explained in the Supplement/Readme. There is also information on how to build custom bioGUI templates.