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Avogadro at the APS March Meeting and Q-Chem Workshop

Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell on

So last week was extremely busy. The APS March Meeting was held in Pittsburgh and Q-Chem held a workshop on Q-Chem at the end of the week. I presented a poster on Avogadro (shown below), met lots of interesting people and got lots of new ideas for both research and Avogadro.

Avogadro poster

As we push towards making a 1.0 release of Avogadro, getting feedback from users in the scientific community is extremely important. As Q-Chem chose to use Avogadro as the builder/visualizer in their workshop I had the opportunity to observe new Avogadro users interact with our application for the first time. I also had the opportunity to help them overcome some initial issues and gained a few new insights.

I was very pleased to meet people at all stages of their career who were very interested in having an open source application that can provide a framework for building and visualizing molecules. I also realized that two of the most sought after features in Avogadro right now are the capability to easily make movies, and a z-matrix editor. People loved the ray-traced images of surfaces, coincidentally I received a request from someone in the press wanting to use an image I put up on my blog last year of ray-traced benzene molecules.

I look forward to hearing from some of the new users we gained in the last week. It is great to see Avogadro receiving more attention. I have started to work on the z-matrix editor and spent the weekend experimenting with movies - more to come soon!

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Justace Clutter on :

Justace ClutterI just saw this post and I wanted to commend you on your poster. Nice looking. I have been to a few of these meetings and in general frown on the lack of love given to poster layout. Great on the vector logos on the top of the poster. Many a time I have seen very pixelated versions of these. Cool software also. Makes me wish that I was in chemistry sometimes to get to play with such pretty things. But then again, High Energy Experimental Physics is also super cool. How pretty is that Higgs mechanism... ;-)

Marcus D. Hanwell on :

Marcus D. HanwellThanks for the compliment, I agree with you on a general lack of attention given to poster layout. I do what I can with LaTeX and other tools to produce visually pleasing posters with useful content.

I am from physics originally - more materials science. Only recently moved to a chemistry department to do a postdoc. Never could get as excited about high energy physics myself... A lot of friends are in enormous collaborations waiting for the next big machine to come online.

Justace Clutter on :

Justace Clutteryes, the day that there is a separate publication for the author list is coming......

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