So last week was extremely busy. The APS March Meeting was held in Pittsburgh and Q-Chem held a workshop on Q-Chem at the end of the week. I presented a poster on Avogadro (shown below), met lots of interesting people and got lots of new ideas for both research and Avogadro.
As we push towards making a 1.0 release of Avogadro, getting feedback from users in the scientific community is extremely important. As Q-Chem chose to use Avogadro as the builder/visualizer in their workshop I had the opportunity to observe new Avogadro users interact with our application for the first time. I also had the opportunity to help them overcome some initial issues and gained a few new insights.
I was very pleased to meet people at all stages of their career who were very interested in having an open source application that can provide a framework for building and visualizing molecules. I also realized that two of the most sought after features in Avogadro right now are the capability to easily make movies, and a z-matrix editor. People loved the ray-traced images of surfaces, coincidentally I received a request from someone in the press wanting to use an image I put up on my blog last year of ray-traced benzene molecules.
I look forward to hearing from some of the new users we gained in the last week. It is great to see Avogadro receiving more attention. I have started to work on the z-matrix editor and spent the weekend experimenting with movies - more to come soon!