About VialTome
A research platform built around two rules, and a refusal to blur either of them.
Who makes it
VialTome is built and maintained by Brandon Mysliwiec. It is an independent project — not a company, not a startup, and not a product with a growth plan. There is no team to email, no sales department and no roadmap negotiated with investors.
That has consequences worth being upfront about. Support is one person answering email. Releases arrive when they are ready rather than on a schedule. In exchange, nothing about VialTome is shaped by the need to extract money from the people using it.
Why it exists
Research records have a habit of scattering. The protocol lives in one spreadsheet, the subjects in another, what actually happened in a notebook, the supplies in a third file, and the reasoning behind any of it in somebody's memory. Then a protocol changes, and every report written before that change quietly becomes wrong.
VialTome exists to keep those things in one place and to keep them honest over time. Protocol versions are immutable, so a report about last quarter still reads correctly after three later revisions. Planned and actual are separate records, so the difference between them is visible instead of overwritten. And the arithmetic shows its work, so it can be checked rather than trusted.
The two rules
Documentation is not recommendation
VialTome records what you enter and what sources reported. It never selects, suggests or validates an amount. This is enforced in the code, not promised in a disclaimer: adding a substance from the Knowledge library to a project transfers its identity and classification only, and the protocol editor opens empty. Published amounts are never copied into a form.
The calculator answers "given these values, what does this correspond to?" and stops there. It will not show syringe marks at all until you confirm which barrel you are holding, because "unit" has no universal meaning across syringes.
Evidence tiers are never blended
Study-reported, mechanistic and community-reported claims each carry a distinct colour, glyph and border style, are never listed together, and each records the study model it came from. Colour alone is never the carrier, so the distinction survives greyscale printing and colour-vision differences.
Where a fact could not be established, VialTome says Unknown, Not Verified or Evidence Not Located rather than filling the gap with something plausible. In the shipped Knowledge library, no citation asserts a DOI or PMID it could not confirm, every citation resolves to a primary source, and every article carries an explicit statement of what was not found.
How it was built and checked
- 255 unit and integration tests, and 70 end-to-end checks run against the installed build.
- Six defects found before release — three by the test suites, three by looking at screenshots. The worst was a display-formatting bug that rendered 100 as 1 in a dose calculator.
- All 57 screenshots on this site are real captures of the installed application. None are mockups.
- The Linux packages were built and structurally verified but not runtime-tested, because no Linux machine was available. That is stated here, on the download page and in the release manifest.
The full account, including what was not verified, is in the documentation.
What it will never do
- Recommend, suggest or pre-fill an amount — anywhere, under any circumstances.
- Send your data anywhere. The only network request it ever makes is the update check, which happens when you press the button and sends nothing about you or your work.
- Require an account, a registration or a sign-in.
- Link to, rank or surface sellers of any substance.
- Charge for a feature, lock one behind a tier, or impose a usage limit.
- Show an advertisement, or nag you for money.
Free, permanently
VialTome is free under the MIT licence. No subscription, no premium tier, no locked features, no usage limits and no advertisements. Every feature described anywhere on this site is available to everyone. If it saves you time you can thank the creator — it unlocks nothing and you will never be asked again.
Contact
Questions, bug reports and corrections to the Knowledge library are all welcome by email at brandonmysliwiec@gmail.com.
For a bug, please include what you did, what happened and what you expected. For a Knowledge correction, please include the source — a correction with a citation can be checked, and one without cannot.
Please do not send data from a real project. VialTome keeps your records on your machine, and a support email should not be the thing that takes them off it.
More of the creator's work is at brandonmysliwiec.com.