Talbica Interactive Periodic Table

The periodic table is a paradise for data visualization. Every element has dozens of properties that can be represented in so many different forms.

I decided to create an interactive chemistry toolset built around the periodic table that would visualize the laws of chemistry in an attractive form. I wanted to introduce an educational tool that could immerse you into chemistry with its outstanding design.

The main principle is the extreme simplicity of the interface. You see the periodic table, plain and clean. If you click on an element, it opens an information card. You type a formula and see a reaction with it. What could be easier? The interface looks obvious and one may not see a designer's work at all. That's what I tried to achieve, actually.

I started with creating a fully adaptive periodic table. If you resize the window, the table will immediately adapt to the new width. In the mobile version, it switches to a special vertical version. This is my know-how. Originally, the periodic table is so wide you cannot fit it on a vertical screen. I changed its layout but preserved the periods' structure. If you rotate the phone horizontally, you'll see the original table.

Then I developed a navigation system with the keyboard. You can navigate through the table with arrows. That was easy. What was more complex is to develop the smart field, which you can see above the table. If you type a chemical formula there, Talbica will automatically capitalize it: naoh will become NaOH. Sounds easy, but what if I type kco3, should it be KCO3 (Potassium Carbon Oxygen) or KCo3 (Potassium Cobalt)? Talbica has an intelligent input that recognizes formulas.

Overall, the main focus was to create a chemistry toolset that doesn't make users think about those annoying things. Nobody wants to manually capitalize each element, and Talbica does this for you. If you use it as a chemist, you'll see that you don't think about how it works. It simply works.

I have plenty of plans. For example, I'm thinking about implementing an interactive nuclear synthesis. I'm also considering connecting a larger database of compounds and reactions, and proofreading it. I believe someday I'll release a paid professional version for students and laboratories.

The project began as a very simple application for Windows 98/XP, and provided a bare minimum of elements properties, a solubility table and a simplest version of reactions balancer. Of course, it had no such great visualization tools as Heat Maps, and the balancer worked extremely slow. In fact, it worked in such a primitive way that couldn't even insert the found coefficients into the reaction and showed them as numbers in a separate field. The second version was better but conceptually stayed the same. Then I abandoned the project for some time because I didn't have enough experience to implement the vision that I had. Only in 2022 I managed to implement everything that I had in my mind. Well, not everything, actually. There's much more to come.

Ideas were coming to my mind during work. In fact, I skipped most of the design and immediately started to code. This is what happens when you can do both design and development: the visual part can be omitted and you can design directly by coding. In the end, it is this approach what led to many features such as Heat Maps and Atomic Models. I didn't think what I could design. Instead, I thought about what could I achieve by code.

I was a keen chemist in school, however I was mostly interested in the inorganic chemistry. When the organic chemistry began, I slightly lost my track in this science. However, by that time parents bought me a first computer, and I swiftly learnt how to code. Then I got this idea to combine my best knowledge in chemistry and programming and bring something interesting to this world. Today, I cannot consider myself a good chemist. However, I'm not a bad physicist, and I even have a certificate from Stanford University for the relativity theory course completion.