RESOURCES

If you have been reading this guide, you must have come across 'the 5 properties' mentioned several times. That’s because they are the fundamental building blocks that make a mineral unique, hence the attempts to bestow their importance. These properties are Composition, Physical, Optical, Crystallographic and Classification. The 'Resources' section is dedicated towards exploring these properties since it contains tools designed to search for minerals based on those properties. For example, you may have a chemical formula of a mineral but don’t know its name, the tools in composition can generate an empirical formula for it, compare and try to match that formula to the 5,000+ mineral formulae on record, calculate its molecular weight, get molecular composition for it or even try to compare that weight against thousands of known molecular weights.

To use any of these tools simply open the Navigation menu and choose the name-sake property under Resources to use it. Take note that each tool is catered towards the data it will be processing. For help on using the tools, go to the dedicate help section for each property. For example, tap the 'Resources > Physical' option to get help on using the physical resources tool. 

1. App Search: Tapping this icon will expand the app search interface and allow you to search for other minerals. Opting to tap a search result will create a new instance of 'Mineral Details' to display it. See the 'Introduction > App Search' topic to learn how to effectively use this tool.

2. Research: Tapping this icon will launch the "Learn Mineralogy" guide pointing towards the tool that started the guide section. For example, if you were using the composition tool and you tap the Research icon, then the App will direct you to the composition section of the "Learn Mineralogy" guide. The same is true of all the other tools since each of them has its own dedicated learn mineralogy guide.

3. Help: Tapping this icon will launch the help guide with emphasis towards the tool that stared it. For example, if you are using the Classification tool and you tap the help icon, you will be directed to this help guide focused on the 'Resources > Classification' section. The same applies to all the other tools and their respective help sections.

4. Overflow menu: Tapping this icon opens a menu with a single option to enable or disable text auto-scrolling for the tool you are using. Each of the five Resources tools will auto-scroll long text if it cannot fit in the single text line for the results they produce. This option allows you to disable or enable this behavior for each individual tool. That is, if you disable text scrolling on the Physical resources tool, it will not affect the other four.