search site  |  contact us  HOME PRODUCTS DOWNLOADS SALES SUPPORT NEWS CrystalMaker® 1.4 for Windows XP Latest Update Brings Key Usability Features 11 December 2006. CrystalMaker Software Ltd is delighted to announce the immediate availability of CrystalMaker version 1.4 for Windows XP: a major update to our crystal structures software for the Windows platform. As is our tradition, a free update is available to our registered users (this is our 18th free update since CrystalMaker 1.0 for Windows was released in April 2005). Sleek New Interface To help celebrate CrystalMaker's 12th Birthday, a brand new version of CrystalMaker for Windows has been released with a vast treasury of new features, a sleek new interface, brand new online help and much more. The most obvious change concerns the program interface. Palette windows and dialogs are now sleeker and many can be resized. Palettes are now "sticky" and can be easily positionned against the edge of the Main Frame window. New Full Screen working options automatically show or hide the Windows Taskbar, allowing more effective use of screen space. Many windows include context-specific Help buttons and the Model and Rendering Options windows also provide buttons to save current settings as the default settings. Easier Model Building The Edit Bonding window has been completely redesigned, providing easier visualization of potential coordination states. Perhaps more significant is the fact that bond editing is now non-destructive: you can safely work with custom atom views, without having these reset by the bond generation process. The new Edit Bonding dialog lets you experiment with adding or editing bonding, with immediate prediction of coordination numbers - and no resetting of custom views Other improvements to model building include more flexible polyhedral displays, whereby ball-and-stick, stick, sphere and "polyhedral" objects can all be combined within the same model. Special care has been taken to ensure that the different object types can be connected smoothly. New Online Help CrystalMaker for Windows 1.4 includes a completely redesigned online help system. This features better organisation and expanded coverage. In addition, Help buttons have been added tothe Edit Structure, Edit Bonding, Model Options, Rendering Options, Export Graphics, Copy Graphics and Symmetry Options dialogs, for direct access to the relevant online Help sections. International Support This version of CrystalMaker has been extensively tested on non-Western systems. The program now provides multi-byte file path support and can read and write text files on systems such as Japanese, in which file paths can have multi-byte characters. In addition, interface elements such as tabbed dialogs, are now displayed correctly when different system fonts are in place. Other Features CrystalMaker for Windows 1.4 includes many additional "under the hood" improvements, providing more efficient and reliable program working. Please refer to the complete version history for more details. Further Information: For a general introduction to CrystalMaker please see the CrystalMaker product description. Download a demonstration version of CrystalMaker 1.4 for Windows (can be used as a free crystal viewer for CIF, PDB, FDAT and other data files). For pricing and ordering information for new licences, please refer to the CrystalMaker Sales page. If you are an existing CrystalMaker-for-Mac user, and wish to take advantage of our new cross-platform upgrade scheme, please visit the upgrades page. © 2008 CrystalMaker Software Limited. All rights reserved worldwide.