Some of you with long memories may recall that I worked on the Kalzium molecular editor for my Google Summer of Code ™ project last summer. The observant among you may have also noticed that Kalzium in KDE 4.0 featured a molecular viewer. Well the freeze meant that much of my work didn’t make it into KDE 4.0. This is the case with many of our current GSoC students (Naomi among them) who are just starting to code as KDE 4.1 is being frozen and released.
Since last summer life has been really hectic, the shipment of my household possessions from the UK to the US was delayed significantly by an incompetent shipping company which also proceeded to break many things... This led to me having no Linux system to develop on for quite some time, and then less time to develop due to having to deal with the fallout of a botched delivery. Still, I am very pleased to be able to show off some of my latest work which made it into KDE 4.1 and will be in KDE 4.1 beta1 (due out in a few days).
I was able to expose some of the extra display types I added along with support for drawing and editing molecules. You can also measure distances and angles of the molecule you are looking at and do some geometry optimisation. Given a little more time I would have liked to expose some of the manipulation features but this new six month cycle was so short and my time was constrained anyway. It will make it into 4.2 at least.
I am looking forward to seeing the animation support Naomi is working on now and am very happy to be able to mentor her over the summer. I think high quality, open source educatonal programs are very important and hope that this editor will be useful in that role. The Avogadro library and application should hopefully be able to satisfy college students and researchers. With the scripting support and open source nature of the two projects I think they interact very well and complement one another.
As always I would love to hear your feedback on the Kalzium changes and the other work we are doing.