Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

I spent quite a bit of yesterday making a few test screencasts at various resolutions, and then trying several video sharing sites in the hopes of finding something better than youtube. There are quite a few screencasts I made that were placed on youtube in the past but I was never happy with the quality. I also spent some time investigating better tools for recording, editing and commentating my screencasts.

The link above is to the blip.tv version. It is the first screencast I ever made with a title page and audio commentary. It is intended to be a brief introduction to Avogadro. It shows a few of the basic features and then moves onto some new and more advanced functionality, such as molecular orbital ray-tracing.

I also uploaded a hi-definition screencast recorded at 1280x720 to Vimeo, and the same one to blip.tv. Finally I gave the showmedo service a try here, I do like their default player size.

I used qt-recordmydesktop to record the screencasts, and kdenlive to edit the video files, compose and render the final video. I also used Audacity to record the audio commentary. The quality of the screencast with audio is a little poor due to recordmydesktop actually recording at 800x604, this resulted in some scaling which made some labels tough to read. Other than that the quality seems to be quite good.

Hopefully the screencasts are useful. I am hoping that I and some of the other developers will be able to produce some tutorial screencasts in the near future. Right now I am coding, adding new features, unit tests and padding out our core API so that we can stabilise it. It looks like screencast quality is improving, let me know what you think of this one

In the last month or two I have been making a large number of changes to the core classes in Avogadro. I will hopefully find the time to discuss this in the near future. One of the other things I have found the time to add is support for rendering meshes in POV-Ray.

The images in this post demonstrate a benzene molecular orbital, and an electrostatic surface potential mapped onto the Van der Waals surface of the molecule. Click on the images to see a big version (1600x1200). There are still lots of improvements but I hope these latest changes will enable people to better visualise surfaces. The addition ofa POV-Ray rendering dialog means that if the command line povray application is installed then Avogadro will automatically execute if for you.

I will hopefully find the time to post more on the changes in Avogadro soon. Life is really busy right now and so I have been a little quieter about progress than usual. Things are still happening and I still want to make your molecules beautiful

For the past couple of weeks Louise and I have been travelling visiting family and friends back in England. It was quite possibly one of the busiest trips I have ever made. Starting out with a good friend's wedding the first weekend we were back where I had the opportunity to take lots of photographs for them. Then down to London on the Sunday for our appointment at the US consulate on Monday. Then we were back up to Sheffield on Tuesday, giving a talk at the University of Sheffield on some of the work I have been doing since I left last year.

On the way back up to Sheffield I managed to pick up a horrible stomach bug and thought I would have to cancel the talk but felt reasonably OK on the day. That was all in the first week back! After that we got a chance to catch up with friends and family. A friend got us a room in the heart of Kelham Island, making it much more convenient to visit several of the best public houses in the city to catch up on some long missed real ale

We managed to catch a nephews birthday and the following week headed north to visit a friend in Leeds and another in Edinburgh. After that it was back down to Sheffield for one last day before spending our final night in England in a hotel in Manchester. We tried a new way back to Pittsburgh which involved three flights and an overnight stay in Philadelphia. We got a flight from Manchester to London Heathrow, spent over five hours in the new Terminal 5 before taking our flight to Philadelphia International.

We arrived late and tired. Thankfully all the visa stuff was fine, arriving in Philadelphia was all OK and the hotel in Philadelphia was pretty nice. At this point to be honest we couldn't wait to get back to our apartment in Pittsburgh and see our dog again. Our first time on Southwest and their boarding system is pretty stupid but they got us home.

Just in time to see the US election unfold. So tonight we have some beers and are settling in to watch it all unfold. I have no vote but do have my fingers crossed that Obama will get in. We will see if I can stay up until it is over as I have been up since 5am this morning. Keep your fingers crossed, it is pretty nice to be in the middle of it all.