Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented (opens in new tab)

I'm not sure if this is what they do, but it seems like a solution would be the git commit hashing procedure. So at the end of a day/worksession have the app take the hash of ( what you entered today + yesterday's hash) so you create a provable trail of changes.

Thanks for the feedback! Nice idea about printing. The export will be here very soon, it simply did not make the cut for 1.0 because it needs more testing.

Yes, the 'first to file' thing is still new enough that many scientists still think it is useful to sign their notebooks for that purpose. There are still subtleties to those rules, though, that we need to investigate a bit.

On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. Labs work with all kinds of data, including samples and information obtained from human trials where privacy is mandated by law. Sync that to the cloud, and you open a huge can of legal-compliance worms.

By keeping local data in a local DB, this is avoided. I see on the website that sync is coming soon. If the developer is smart, they'll allow selective sync so that labs can choose what to upload and what to keep local, or will offer some sort of non-cloud p2p sync solution.

Sorry to bring up the whole native vs web app debate, but this kind of app is actually a good fit for a native app: access to files, very specific workflows requiring fine-tuned user interface and user experience. Not impossible to do in a web app, but much harder to do right, particularly when your main competitor is a paper notebook that has so much flexibility and is so easy to use.

We definitely want to make sure you can always export your data. At this stage, you have of course to take our word for it, since we do not have export working yet. However, we also have a section in our intial user guide about the format used to store those documents. It is SQLite-based, and is a simple key-value store (using the open-source PARStore implementation). Also, it's not store "in the cloud", it is on your local hard drive, and you can easily get to that library via the preferences of the app.

Looks like they'll be adding export soon: "Can I print, export, share an experiment or a protocol? The initial version of Findings has not implemented these features, but it is coming very soon. Most of the implementation is ready, but it requires a bit more work for integration, and it was not done on time for the 1.0 release. Our apologies for the delay! But please let us know what you need, so we'll do our best to include it."