From chemistry-request@server.ccl.net Wed Feb 6 20:12:58 2002 Received: from ks.uiuc.edu ([130.126.120.73]) by server.ccl.net (8.11.6/8.11.0) with ESMTP id g171Cwc11744 for ; Wed, 6 Feb 2002 20:12:58 -0500 Received: from geneseo.ks.uiuc.edu (geneseo.ks.uiuc.edu [130.126.120.127]) by ks.uiuc.edu (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id g171Cmc18787 for ; Wed, 6 Feb 2002 19:12:48 -0600 (CST) Received: (from johns@localhost) by geneseo.ks.uiuc.edu (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.1) id TAA08785 for chemistry@ccl.net; Wed, 6 Feb 2002 19:12:47 -0600 (CST) Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 19:12:47 -0600 From: John Stone To: chemistry@ccl.net Subject: Announce: VMD 1.7.2 (Windows-only GUI update) is available Message-ID: <20020206191246.A8776@geneseo.ks.uiuc.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.19i 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 vmd@ks.uiuc.edu -- 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: johns@ks.uiuc.edu Phone: 217-244-3349 WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Fax: 217-244-6078