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CrystalMaker® 7.0 for Mac OS X Long-Awaited Upgrade is Packed with Features |
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11 July 2005. CrystalMaker Software Ltd is delighted to
announce the immediate availability of CrystalMaker 7.0 for Mac OS X:
the biggest-ever upgrade of their award-winning
crystal structures visualization software for Mac.
Nearly three years in the making, CrystalMaker 7 for Mac OSX is based around a flexible, high-performance "engine" design, and provides powerful new tools and functionality, as well as cross-platform compatibility with the recently-released CrystalMaker 1 for Windows XP. |
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Thermal Ellipsoids One of our most highly-requested features is now reality: thermal ellipsoids (or to give them their official name, "atomic displacement parameters") can now be be loaded from text files (e.g., CIF, SHELX and CrystalMaker text formats) and displayed and manipulated on screen. Biso, Bij and Uij formats are supported. CrystalMaker provides a wide range of ellipsoid styles, ranging from basic black-and-white "ORTEP" representations, through to photo-realistically rendered translucent ellipsoids. As with atom (sphere) styles, different ellipsoid styles can be assigned to different element types and/or different sites, using the Atoms pane of the Model Options window. The ellipsoid probability value can also be adjusted (the default value is set at 50% probability) and saved with the structure; a new default value can also be set as a user preference. |
A photo-rendered thermal ellipsoid, with an octant "cutout" to show the principal axes and their principal elliptical sections. |
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| A wide range of ellipsoid styles can be selected for individual sites or element types, using the all-new Atoms pane of the Model Options window. |
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Massive Structures Visualization CrystalMaker 7 includes a major new engine architecture, designed to permit the visualization of truly massive structures (up to 2 billion atoms), with highly-efficient use of dynamical memory, high-speed "Turbo Bonds" bond and coordination search algorithms, and unlimited potential for visualizing bonding and polyhedral geometries. |
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| Virtually-unlimited numbers of atoms, bonds and polyhedra can be displayed - ideal for visualizing the results of large-scale computer simulations, such as this example of radiation damage in a perovskite lattice. |
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Previous versions of CrystalMaker imposed limits on the maximum
numbers of bonds per atom and hence the maximum size of polyhedra.
These limits are simply blown away in CrystalMaker 7: truly
gargantuan polyhedral geometries can now be generated.
These are ideal for visualizing large coordination
clusters, or simplifying complex zeolite cages as "solid"
polyhedral units.
Even if you don't work with very-large structures or polyhedra, you will still see the effects of our "re-engineering" work. The highly-efficient use of dynamical memory means less memory demands on your system - and faster program execution. |
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Custom-Defined Polyhedra A new "Selection > Make Polyhedron" command lets you define which atoms you want at the vertices of a polyhedron - with the option of generating symmetrically-equivalent sites. This is great for visualizing non-radial distributions as "solid" polyhedra (e.g., a zeolite channel, rendered as a polyhedral "cylinder"). |
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| Using the Make Polyhedron command to generate a "solid" polyhedron (right) from a group of selected atoms (left). |
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Easier Visualization of Molecular Crystals Newly developed and refined "Optimize Range" commands have been rewritten, allowing rapid viewing of molecular units within complex crystals. Although this was possible in earlier versions of CrystalMaker, it could be very slow - especially if large molecular units were involved. CrystalMaker 7's optimized bond generation and seamless memory handling speeds up these operations considerably - and the use of new connectivity algorithms means that you can visualize an ideal, "molecular" unit cell right away. |
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Keyboard Shortcuts for Toolbar Operations You can quickly switch from one tool to another without having to reach for the mouse; just type the keyboard shortcut for the appropriate tool (we've used many of the common Adobe Photoshop shortcuts here). Another great time saver is our new temporary rotation mode, which lets you rotate the structure with the mouse - with any tool active - simply by holding down the space key, then clicking and dragging with the mouse. |
Change tools without reaching for the mouse. |
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Other Changes CrystalMaker 7.0 can read files generated by CrystalMaker for Windows 1.x, as well as Mac files written by all previous versions of CrystalMaker, back to version 2.0. Files are saved in a new, cross-platform format that can be read by CrystalMaker 1.x for Windows. A new "Select" submenu has been added at the top of the "Selection" menu. The menu contains a new "Select > Nearest Neighbours" command, which allows you to select all atoms that are bonded directly to one or more existing selected atoms. You can repeat this command to build up an extended network of first-, second-, third-, etc. nearest neighbours. Other changes include new, duotone gridline display; a global show/hide labels command; auto-generation of site colours; the option to delete selected sites in a crystal; higher-precision bond distance and angle output; atom vector selection; easier text manipulation with the Annotation Tool; a new, Preferences file format - designed to be extensible, so that more settings can be personalized in the future; online help files are optimized for searching under "Tiger", and much, much more... |
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© 2008 CrystalMaker Software Limited. All rights reserved worldwide. |
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