Avogadro 0.1.0 Released

I started my Google Summer of Code ™ work a little early due to the upcoming feature freeze for KDE 4.0. Yesterday the Avogadro 0.1.0 beta was released and I have of course added an ebuild for it to Gentoo. Avogadro is at an early stage in development but it is already packed with features and I am really pleased that I have been given the opportunity to work on this project for the summer.

Above is a screen shot of the Avogadro release viewing a 4-methylbenzenethiol molecule (the ones that encapsulate the gold nanoparticles I work with on my PhD project). I have done a lot of work on the navigation and manipulation tools as well as adding the Van der Waals sphere engine. I have been working for the past few weeks on getting the missing features needed to port kalzium to libavogadro into the library.

So I have already made quite a few commits to Avogadro, and yesterday I made my first commit to the KDE SVN repository. I am suffering from split personalities though On sourceforge I am cryosuk (due to cryos already being taken) and on KDE SVN I am hanwell (it is KDE policy to use surnames rather than nicknames). So now I have three nicknames/account names in use...

I have been doing some initial work porting kalzium to use libavogadro too. Right now my time is really limited for a number of reasons though and so I have posted my limited progress to the kalzium list. Hopefully I will be able to do a little more this weekend. We need to have it working before the feature freeze in June. I am confident we will be able to do that. More porting is certainly required but I do not think that much more time is needed before we get it rendering again.

We would of course to hear any feedback you have on Avogadro. We also have lots of new features planned, many of which I will be implementing over the summer as my project gets into full swing and I can work on it full time. Time for me to get back to my thesis - hope you like the Avogadro release!