Subject: Announce: VMD 1.7.2 (Windows-only GUI update) is available

From: John Stone <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 19:12:47 -0600

Dear CCL,
  I'm happy to announce that we have released a small Windows-specific 
update to our molecular visualization package VMD, version 1.7.2.

This update is only for the Windows platform, we suggest that 
Unix/Mac users should be running VMD 1.7.1 if they aren't already.

During the course of our VMD 1.8 development efforts we 
fixed a deficiency in the implementation of the mouse 
cursor manipulation and event handling code for the VMD OpenGL 
window.  The old behavior made resizing of the VMD OpenGL window
tricky, and less pleasurable to use than the Unix/Mac versions, in that
regard.  Since the required code changes were small, I took the
code from our VMD 1.8 development tree and back-patched it against
VMD 1.7.1, so that we could bring this improvement to the users
immediately, rather than waiting until VMD 1.8 goes through the
full release cycle.  If you're running VMD on Windows, I highly
recommend upgrading to this new version.  The rest of the code
remains unchanged, so we're able to provide this new version with 
much less testing (and thus delay) than is usually required.

VMD 1.8 development news:
-------------------------
We're already well into developing VMD 1.8, and we have some great
things in progress for that release.  One of the highlights in VMD 1.8
will be the new "plugin" system which will allow extension modules
to be added to VMD on-the-fly, without having to recompile the program.
This is similar in principle to the plugins you may already be familiar with
for web browsers.  In the case of VMD, we intially used the plugin
system as a means of providing the "psfgen" structure building interface
in VMD 1.7.1 and 1.7.2.  VMD 1.8 extends the plugin system significantly,
and will use plugins for all file readers and writers, and will allow
VMD users to write their own readers/writers for their favorite
molecule file formats with much greater ease.  This is particularly
useful for those individuals developing their own simulation software
that have need to make their own file formats.  

Since this plugin work is still in the fairly early stages, we have not 
yet written the full documentation that will ultimately be included 
when the functionality is complete, but we would be very interested 
in hearing from individuals that would like to develop file reader/writer 
plugins for VMD 1.8.  The best part about plugins is that they may be 
distributed separately from VMD, and can be developed "after the fact" 
for already shipping versions of VMD (post 1.8).  In this way, authors
of an MD simulation package can provide a file reader/writer plugin for
VMD with their simulation package, and know that VMD users will be able
to read their program's data files.  

If you are interested in developing file reader/writer plugins, please
do send us an email.  

Thanks!
  John Stone
  [email-masked]

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: [email-masked]                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078