Announcement: BALL 1.0

This latest release contains mostly bug fixes over 1.0 and some changes and adaptations to a larger set of supported platforms. In particular, we will provide installers and packages for both, a standalone viewer and the library. The number of changes is rather small when compared to 1.0pre2, but we spent a lot of time on testing and on simplifying the installation on all platforms.

Changes from 1.0pre2:

• Our viewer molview has been renamed to BALLView in order to avoid confusion (there are other applications out there with the name molview)
• default constructor of FragmentDB does no longer open the default fragment database. If you want the same behavior as before, simply call FragmentDB::init() or use the other constructor with an empty string as an argument (e.g. FragmentDB db("");).
• The meaning of the selection in a force field has changed slightly. In normal cases, you should not notice the difference. Check your energies, if you are often calculating energies of partially selected systems.

Added + improved

• MOLFile and SDFile are now more robust with respect to slight errors in the files
• Documentation has been added and improved in numerous places
• Dialog to download and open PDB files directly from www.PDB.org
• Mouse button emulation in Scene for mice with less than three buttons (e.g Mac OS) use SHIFT, ALT, CTRL together with the mouse button
• Mousewheel sensitivity can be adjusted
• Now using Windows native dialogs on Windows platforms
• BALLView can now log its output to a file for debugging and archiving

Installation:

• Additional platform: Mac OS X (Panther)
• Support for G++ 3.4
• Windows installer for BALLView and BALL
• Debian and RPM packages for several Linux distributions
• Simplified installation debugging: configure now creates an archive (conf.diag.tar) containing all relevant files created by configure we might need to debug your installation problems. If you experience any trouble, please include this archive in your bug report.

Platforms

We have tested BALL 1.0 on the following platforms:

• Windows w/ MS .NET
• Linux/i386 w/ g++ 3.2.x/3.3.x/3.4
• Mac OS X/Panther w/ g++ 3.3
• Solaris/SPARC w/ g++ 3.2.1
• Windows w/ cygwin (w/o visualization)
• IRIX w/ CC 7.3.2.1m