I’ve had some discussions with colleagues here about a “simple” build of Avogadro (e.g., turns off a bunch of features / complexity) for teaching purposes.
For example, this would generally turn off most / all of the input generators, plugin downloader, layers, etc.
If this is interesting, what would you turn off or simplify?
I think it would be very useful to know why your colleagues (or any others here) feel Avogadro in its current form is too complex for their purposes, what the negative impact of the complexity is, and how removing functionality would help?
Is it that core educational functionality is too hard to find? Is it that students find the interface too overwhelming? Is it that getting Python set up in their environment is a challenge/not permitted? Is it that students shouldn’t be able to install plugins from the web without permission?
I actually don’t find that Avogadro is a hugely complex program, and I reckon that the complexity is perceived rather than real, which could be alleviated through improvements to the UI.
If layers are a niche and complex feature, for example, an easy step is to hide the Layers Pane by default. I have almost never used them, I suspect in general they aren’t often – so better not to have them as part of the default window. Similarly, I think I’ve said before that in my opinion the View Configuration Pane should be hidden unless/until the user clicks on the ••• icon.
Streamlining the interface could go a long way towards making Avogadro feel easier to use and guide the user towards key functionality. If that’s what it’s about, that is. So yeah, I’d be keen to understand the motivation a little better.
I’ve got a bit of experience teaching some labs with the Spartan software, and that experience suggests that a ‘student version’ would be a good idea. There are two versions of the Spartan software, a full version and a student version, and the student version does have a fair bit less capacity than the full version, which can be nice since students are almost always very unfamiliar with the entire nature of comp chem.
I also think that a perceived complexity from a student perspective would be extremely informative for improving the UI and other elements. If there is a thing that would get turned off for being “too complex” or if it isn’t intuitive, then perhaps it should get changed in the main version. For example, some of the display types don’t actually seem to do anything, like Cartoons, Non-Covalent, QTAIM, Symmetry Elements. They might do things under particular conditions, but after using Av2 for a few years I have never come across those conditions. Things like that are things that I would imagine a student would be confused by, and so should probably receive a change.
Yeah, that’s a good example – the list of display types would be a lot less overwhelming if only the ones that were currently applicable were listed.
Perhaps a student “mode” that can be toggled would suffice?