In my copious spare time (hah) I would have liked to get to grips with programming, in a real language such as C or ObjectiveC. I did have a fiddle just before leaving the UK, and indeed was able to wrestle PERL to create some useful (no, really) web-based applications such as the Protein Calculator and the Codon Usage Wrangler.
PERL has its uses but I'm really interested in learning an object-oriented language that I can easily integrate with Apple's wonderful Xcode environment to make shiny applications for my shiny Mac. It's a hobby thing. The problem I have had — aside from the lack of time — is the absence of a worthy adversary, I mean project. So the Protein Calculator and the Codon Wrangler came about because there was a need for those functions in the lab, and how I implemented them seemed the fastest and most accessible way at the time (we had some Other OS users in the lab and I was not going to beat my head about cross-platform code).
