Interactive Periodic Table | Hacker News Reader

Interactive Periodic Table

ptable.com

108 pointssolarized22 comments

This is mine. I spent quarantine greatly upgrading it from its previous design from roughly 2007 (old.ptable.com) which itself was a great upgrade to how it looked in 1997 (https://web.archive.org/web/19990208231647/http://www.dayah....). It uses no frameworks or libraries and has a payload size of ~64K if you use an ad/tracker blocker, and that includes all the property data and WebGL orbitals rendered from the Schrodinger equation on the Electrons tab. Fully keyboard accessible with arrows/tabs. One controversial feature is fit-to-window that uses some elaborate CSS math (no JS) to keep the size fixed as you switch from topbar to sidebar or turn Wide on/off.

A lot of functionality is hidden, which is why I have the 100-second demo video: https://ptable.com/demo. Would love to hear impressions or feedback as staring at it for months has blinded me to first impressions/annoyances.

Android -> Does cool stuff in chrome, does nothing in edge.

I believe the non-beta Android Edge still uses EdgeHTML which doesn't support optional chaining and I abandoned support for as it's now 0.08% of my users. Try out the beta?

haha, nah easier to just use it on chrome, I only have both so I can stay logged-in to different accounts without hassles. Although I think edge performed marginally better on my low spec phone when I tested it at one point.

Good work! This has been my go to for a long time. Like early oughts.

Only thing I can think to ask for is a table of the isotopes!

Thanks for the long-term support. Do you consider the click-to-fan out isotopes now to be too clumsy for your use?

Sorry to barge in into the thread, but regarding the isotopes with current pop-out style: As a person who lately started collaborating with NMR people I think it will be nice if one can filter them by half-life/abundance (e.g. to filter out anything that has natural abundance of 0 or below x), and then look at magnetic/quadrupole moment to see if resonance people can measure it).

But anyways, thanks for all the work you've done! I've been using it daily for the past 10-11 years, it is a great resource :D

Wow, over a decade! I'm sure you have much feedback to offer. You've convinced me to change the way search works with fanned isotopes. Currently, searching for "infinity" under half-life will show stable elements or ">0" under abundance will show non-zero values by dimming those isotopes. Instead, I'll have it filter them out entirely rather than adjusting opacity.

I forget you added that sometimes, but I did love finding it! What I am missing is the experience of looking at that curve/smear of a graph that is the table of the isotopes.

Keep up the good work, probably sums it up best :)

I didn’t mean isotopes. I want to challenge you with this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides but I misremember the name sometimes.

This is absolutely one of my favorite sites - especially since the responsive design update. The isotope search is absolutely gorgeous, along with the new format, in general. I may be a bit biased though, since it was this website that got me into web development and serious programming in general. (At that time, ptable wasn't responsive and I wanted to create a different periodic table site that had that feature). I'm glad ptable is being featured here - while I was at college I was surprised to find that not a significant majority of people knew about the site. Even for high school chemistry, it's orders of magnitude easier to use compared to the textbook or online ad-hoc element search queries.

I liked Compounds features so much. Playing alchemy for a real.

This thing could be so helpful during my chemistry classes. We need more of this. Great job!

I also like how you can select isotopes in Isotopes tab in Z-axis.

Check out also a beautiful periodic table constructor from Moscow that won IF design award: https://periodic.artlebedev.ru

(About the project: https://www.artlebedev.com/mendeleev-table/)

Wow. Super cool. I really liked the temperature slider.

For some reason no one has done a periodic table showing trends in periodicity, weight, size, electronegativity etc.

Select any property to see trends visualized in color. Select the color boxes next to Minimum/Maximum to customize those colors.

Nice work! If you added tables for common cations, polyatomic anions, acids and solvation rules it would cover most of my gen chem memory items.

This is really, really cool! Wish I had had this back in chemistry class.

human universe is not so hot. please log scale toward smaller values.

I'm not sure if using a log scale is the best choice, because it will give too much space to the neighborhood of 0K, and I guess people is more interested in the 0°C 100°C range (or -50°C -200°C range?). Perhaps a scale like x^(1/2) or other exponent would be better.

definitely hard to get to STP or thereabouts with fat fingers and small phone screen.

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