Bench stories
PhytoNote: the bench app that never loses a measurement
How a Flutter offline-first app reshapes UV data entry in a phytochemistry lab. 200 ms validation, on-the-spot IC50, traceable Excel export — and free downloads for Android and Linux.
The midnight PhD student: why PhytoNote was born from a botched DPPH plate
11:32 PM in the Rabat phytochemistry lab. One swapped UV absorbance in Excel, three lost days, ruined arnicaline standard. That night, I decided to learn Flutter.
Fifteen 96-well plates, thirty students, one Shimadzu: how I rescued an M2 lab session
A Thursday in April, three dilution errors, a quality audit ten days out, and eight lab phones. How PhytoNote turned a DPPH session into four clean hours.
Eight days in Tata-Akka: my notebooks, a Hach DR1900, and an app that lost nothing
Field mission in southern Morocco on Lavandula dentata and Argania spinosa. One thunderstorm, one drowned paper notebook, and PhytoNote saving the week.
Turning down 50,000 dirhams: why PhytoNote stays GPL even when Arganor Labs writes the cheque
A Casablanca cosmetics lab offered me 5,000 euros a year for a closed PhytoNote edition. I said no, and here is the compromise we found instead.
The reviewer, the post-it, and the birth of PhytoNote
April 2025, a Journal of Ethnopharmacology reviewer asks for Trolox lots on 24 measurements. For three of them, all I have is a phone snapshot of a post-it. The trigger.
Changing labs, changing protocols: PhytoNote's YAML layer on a joint thesis
Six months at LBVpa Tours on a joint thesis. A local DPPH at 50 µM instead of 100, trolox instead of ascorbic acid. Twenty minutes to edit a YAML and my data flowed through.
The quercetin vial opened in November: six measurements to redo and a field missing from my app
Back from a Seville conference, I find my quercetin standard has been out of its stability window for two months. Reagent traceability, that black hole of academic labs.
The EMINES workshop: one UV-1800, a shared Nikon, and 12 students waiting
Resazurin workshop on Candida albicans south of Marrakech. The bottleneck wasn't the assay, it was data entry. One app, thirty minutes, unblocked.
Yassine, ATER across 3 campuses: how he published in J. Ethnopharmacol despite the chaos
Marrakech, Beni Mellal, Safi: three labs, six notebooks, one PhD student on the edge. Three months later, his supervisor wrote to me to understand.
Hajar, Tétouan, and her first publication on rockrose
A LinkedIn message from a Master's student in Tétouan who wants to re-enter 30 Cistus ladanifer measurements in PhytoNote after her internship. Four hours later, her first paper was submittable.