Avogadro 0.6.1 Released
Sunday, March 9. 2008
I am pleased to announce that I tagged and released Avogadro 0.6.1 yesterday evening. This is a bug fix release which fixes one pretty large bug that slipped through - the OpenGL context was lost if switching between virtual desktops, multiple views etc rendering the OpenGL window useless unless the application was restarted. As such I would encourage anyone running Avogadro 0.6.0 to upgrade to this new version. It also features several smaller bug fixes and feature enhancements.
The screen shot above shows Avogadro 0.6.1 running in a KDE 4 session. One of the small visual tweaks I made was to add a second light source to our default OpenGL scene which really helps to illuminate the other side of the scene. Thanks go out to Albert for his suggestion of adding another light source. Hopefully there are no really big bugs remaining but Avogadro is still in the beta stages of its development. It is rapidly approaching a stable release though and I am very happy with our progress so far.
We would love to hear what you think of Avogadro. I had one person question why we always have to use the latest and greatest version of OpenBabel and felt I should offer some explanation. Many of the features exposed in Avogadro use functions and structures in OpenBabel. I myself was quite heavily involved in improving OpenBabel's support for Gaussian cube files and the cube format so that we could load and display orbitals for example. As such we often add new features or fix bugs in OpenBabel trunk and so a new release of OpenBabel must be used in order for everything to work.
There are already ebuilds for this latest version in the Gentoo tree. Ubuntu/Debian builds are in the process of being built. We should hopefully have Mac and Windows binaries very soon too.
I am headed to a meeting in the UK where Donald and I will be talking with other scientists about visualisation in chemistry and related areas. We will of course be showing off Avogadro as well as talking with many other people working in this area. I am very much looking forward to it and hope that this will lead to further innovation in the Avogadro project as well as the open source chemistry movement in general. It will of course be great to have a full English breakfast and some real ale too!
Me
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-> Hi, I've just presented Avogadro to the people of my laboratory. It's a research lab working on molecular epidemiology. People seemed very interested and are willing to use Avogadro to illustrate their papers. They couldn't believe that they wouldn't even have to pay or ask authorisations for it. : )
Unfortunately I could only find version 0.2 for Windows so I'm looking forward to try 0.6.1.
We do aim in future to release binaries at the same time or very soon after the source release is made. I do prefer to make the source packages available as soon as possible so that Linux distributions have time to package binaries too. I would love to hear what people end up doing with Avogadro.
One thing we'd really like to add to Avogadro is an easy way to download online molecules (e.g., PDB entries) by one menu command. For example, a nice little dialog that lets you enter a PDB ID and it opens up the protein directly.
Another example would let you pick a URL and load molecules directly from a webserver, FTP, etc.
I was wondering if you could rebuild the windows installer of avogadro with the bugfix about povray export. My boss uses some Avogadro-made views of a molecule (called darapladib) and I have to take screenshots of avogadro because the POVray export of the current build doesnt work.
He's very pleased with the results (so well done mates !) but it would be probably better with a povray render.
I haven't visual studio to rebuild it myself. If you provide instructions on how to build it with code::blocks or something free, I would be happy to do it myself, of course.
Best wishes,
Pierre