Well, I missed May and June updates, but I’ll definitely keep sending out development updates.
Since the April update, there are some general community updates:
- Google Summer of Code 2018 has started, and Adarsh has made some great progress on molecular dynamics visualization and analysis: GSoC 2018 Project: Molecular Dynamics support for Avogadro 2
- We’ve received feedback from the community survey: https://avogadro.cc/news/community-survey-results/
- We’ll have the 2018 User’s Group meeting on August 25th in Pittsburgh, PA: https://avogadro.cc/news/avogadro-user-meeting/
Upcoming Releases
We’re still in need of a 1.91 release soon. There have been over 335 commits since Dec. 2016 when 1.90 was released.
Roadmap
As a reminder, we’re trying to make progress on features for 2.0. A summary is available on GitHub Projects
In particular, I’m personally working to finish up the Python commands/workflows and auto-optimize force field support. This should be done “real soon now” and I’ll open discussion topics as they finish.
I’ve also hired a student who’s working to add efficient molecular surfaces (e.g., Van der Waals, Solvent Accessible, Solvent Excluded) and some of this is up as a pull request
Help Needed
I’d like to know if others are willing to help - I have entered a pile of possible tasks into GitHub - many are “good first issues” and can be tackled fairly easily.
More importantly, please feel free to submit suggestions for discussion on the forum or GitHub. The survey indicated over 80% of Avogadro users have never even submitted a bug report. (But were willing to fill out a 5-10 minute survey…)