Launching BashTheBug on the Zooniverse mobile app

After feedback from a number of volunteers, we’ve decided to change (nearly all) the workflows so you can classify images of M. tuberculosis growing using the new Zooniverse mobile app.

You can get the Zooniverse mobile app for iOS and Android devices via their respective App Stores. If you sign in and click either the Biology or Medicine link you will see BashTheBug under the “Made For Mobile” heading. Choose one the workflows and that is it!

It isn’t perfect; the main difficulty is that the app does not yet support landscape mode, so since the images are in landscape orientation you instinctively turn your device round and … nothing happens. We’ve fed this back to the Zooniverse team and hope that this will be fixed in future versions, but we can’t give a firm date just now.

If you touch the image you can then zoom in to the individual wells if the classification isn’t obvious. Or, simply choose the workflows with fewer wells!

Since there is now a single question, there can be 8-13 answers depending on the number of wells, so you will likely need to scroll down. One nice feature is that once you’ve touched the button corresponding to your chosen answer it automatically scrolls down so you can see the “Submit” button.

Some of the more experienced volunteers said they preferred the single question workflow on their laptop since you need to make fewer clicks per image so it helps you speed up. Hopefully you will find this too!

Finally, all of the workflows, except 7 wells, have just reached a major milestone so we decided to convert all the workflows to the new single question format, except 7 wells, which will remain with two questions until it has also reached the end of its current dataset. You will therefore only be able to work on the 7 wells workflow in the browser i.e. on a laptop. When it finishes, we’ll convert that also to the single question format.

Happy classifying and I hope this makes it easier and a bit more enjoyable. Please send comments via the Talk Boards.