Obviously, the 2.0 release will get the full release notes, and further work on the webpages. (Thanks to @matterhorn103 and @brockdyer03 for putting in effort on the latter.)
I’m thinking of some other “announcement messages” to explain why people should upgrade - particularly things you can do with 2.0 that weren’t possible in 1.2:
- Improved rendering speed and quality, including real-time shadows and depth effects
- Volumetric orbitals and electron density
- Layers to customize rendering and hide / show parts of the system like solvent molecules
- Symmetry detection and rendering
- Template tool to quickly create inorganic / organometallic complexes or functional groups
- Solvent-accessible and solvent-excluded surfaces
- Plugin system to enable energy and electrostatic models
- Plugins to add menu commands for XTB, building molecular packing, generating surface slabs, and more
- Updated and new input generator tools, including syntax highlighting
Other ideas?
The far better performance and far far fewer crashes in Avo 2 were the main things that made me frustrated with Avogadro 1.2 back whenever I still had to use it for MOs.
1 Like
The plugins are huge for me, as is the symmetry detection and rendering.
Honestly one thing I’m not sure can be overstated is the visual improvements. Every other 3D visualization software I’ve seen/tried looks like it was written in 1978 with COBOL (exaggeration, but not always that far off). Avo2 actually works on 4K monitors, the atoms are clean, orbitals are smooth (volumetric rendering is super cool), I can get GIFs of reaction pathways or optimization trajectories, and in general it feels modern.
The vibes are just better in my opinion, but I don’t know if it’s possible to put “Has better vibes” as a reason to switch.
Well, more like written for Silicon Graphics with OpenGL 1.0 in like the mid-90s. Because many of them were. Marcus and I literally went through basic OpenGL tutorials. Based on my visual memory of some of the webpages, I’m sure they were written near the dawn of the web.
Graphics are fairly easy to generate, for sure.
I’m not sure “Avogadro, now with far fewer crashes” is the selling point you want.
The integrated Dynamics tool is an awesome feature that would surely be found useful by many users. I think it is still being tested, but still, in my opinion, it deserves a place in the points-to-upgrade list.
1 Like
Maybe it strikes the wrong tone. Naturally you’d want to use positive language like “more performant” and “much more stable” or “robust” rather than negative like “less laggy” or “fewer crashes”. But I get what you’re saying.