NJPlot

Computers greatly enhance every domain of activity, especially when it comes to creating and keeping records of products, documents and even genetic data. Phylogenetics is the science branch responsible with the study of evolutionary relationships and this is where applications like NJPlot come in handy as a means of viewing and analyzing related data.

The application manages to make a good impression even before running it because you don't need to install in on your system. This means you can keep it on a removable storage device along with your projects to use on the go. Registries are not changed so neither is the integrity of your system.

Note that the application is strictly dedicated to analysis, with no creation or editing options whatsoever. As such, you need to make sure you have the necessary files to analyze. The application is only capable of opening PHB formats, mainly associated PHYLIP files.

Once you get the file to reveal its content in the main window, either by dragging it over your workspace or through the dedicated file menu, you're free to use a few viewing tools to analyze your data.

Truth is, the good impression is quickly blown off by the poor representation of data, as well as the shallow set of options at your disposal. Although there's enough space to view the whole tree, there's the possibility for text and descriptions to overlap if the project is too complex.

On the other hand, there are three fonts you can choose for representation, size specifications, as well as a zoom tool. Navigation is rather difficult and zooming in only stretches content horizontally. In case you decide to print it, there's an option to specify on how many pages to spread content.

The set of view options aren't abundant, with entries to swap nodes, display new outgroups or subtree view. You can choose to display branch lengths and bootstrap values when in full tree view.

Simplicity might come in handy, because you're not overwhelmed with too many visual elements. In terms of exporting, you can save under the same format, print out the design on a sheet of paper or export as a PDF file, which is probably the main advantage of the application.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that NJPlot is far from being the best of its kind, with a lot of missing features. Although the design is simple and you quickly get the hang of it, representation leaves a lot more to be desired, with little support for specialized files and little practicality overall.