Atom in a Box HD

This app is amazing. The particles and orbitals are properly shown when probability and the idea of "wavicles" are put into account. I believe that a more standard should also be included that bridges the gap. This would be ideal for people that are new to quantum mechanics and particle physics.

Atom in a box gives great images and some nice tools for altering the appearance of orbitals, much as it did as a desktop/laptop app years ago. Since I have migrated to the use of my iPad for teaching Freshman chemistry, I was pleased to see that I could show these images again. However, the migration to the iPad didn't come at all seamlessly with respect to this platform. If you want to show the radial distribution functions, for example, you can't zoom by pinching and stretching - you live with what is shown. No coordinate systems can be added to the images. First-year chemistry students just aren't going to understand complex wavefunctions, but there is no way to take real linear combinations to show px and py (not so bad, of course, since they look just like pz). Real d orbitals other than d0 would be nice though.

The Mac version of this app is superb. The iPad version has one of the most annoying user interfaces I have ever encountered. The floating text fields serve no purpose that I could discern but make the app extremely difficult to use. One minor nit: for an app with the "HD" designation, the material on the left side is very pixelated on an iPad 3. Otherwise, a very user visualizer of the hydrogen wavefunctions.

To disclose first, for many years I've used the mac version of atom in a box as a teaching tool. It is excellent -- unparalleled. For the development of chemistry and bonding, having the ability to set up hybrid orbitals (superposition in physics lingo) is incredibly helpful. Regretfully, this is missing in the ipad version. I would have contacted the developer directly, but their web pages provide no direct support information. The mac version also gives the opportunity to slice through wave functions showing 2D projections -- also very helpful but lacking here. And finally, while the floating buttons on the ipad version are cute at first, they become annoying when trying explain to a student. Fixed vs floating buttons should be an option. Updating the ipad HD version to function more like the mac version (that's been around for 10+ years) would make this a real five star app. As it currently is, the app shows colorful orbitals, but that's about it.

This app is an absolute must in physics or chemistry courses when a modern visualization of hydrogenic wavefunctions is needed. I use it several times each semester.

This app offers no practical explanation for what your actually looking at. For example, the 3 variables at the bottom left I assume refer to the shell, subshell, and orbital. Since I am not a Phd physicist I don't know for sure, so why not tell us instead of giving us a long mathematical quantum equation which means little to anyone except a physics Phd. Furthermore, I must assume that the program presumes that each orbital is full since there is no way to enter the number of electrons but again, I'm not sure because the developers offer no practical explanation. This means your not seeing half the atoms (I guess) because each orbital has a 2 electron capacity. If you really want to create an educational app geared to help those of us who are not physics Phd's but who are laymen and students why not simply make it so all we have to do is enter the number of electrons or better yet the name of the element so we know for sure what we are seeing? The electron configurations for all the elements are already known and that is all that is needed to create an accurate visualization for each and every atom. Make your app more towards teaching what you know and less towards flaunting what you know and I would give it 5 stars.