VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 17 2000 - 10:01:47 CST

Hi VMD-L,
  I've just finished making the VMD 1.5a1 binaries available
in the VMD download area. I've made a brief list of the changes
we've made below. Most of the changes have been bug fixes,
particularly for the Windows version of VMD, but there are
various other improvements as well. This version of VMD is
now built using FLTK instead of XForms. This has cured a number
of long standing bugs that were XForms specific. The FLTK
GUI looks a little different than the XForms GUI did, but
hopefully nobody will mind too much. Also, the popup menu
is now gone forever, and has been replaced by a "Mouse" menu/form.
Now that all of the VMD binaries are built using FLTK, the Unix
and Windows versions have essentially identical GUIs, which was
not previously the case. Let us know what you think...
We are still working on updating the documentation to match
the new/changed GUI elements, but this will be done by the
time 1.5 is released.

  New Features
    o Windows versions of VMD now write their snapshot images as
      24-bit color Windows Bitmaps (.bmp) files now.
    o Added the ability to modify the name, type, resname, resid
      chain, and segname of a selection of atoms.

  General Improvements and Bug Fixes
    o The Unix versions of VMD are now built with FLTK instead of XForms,
      this brings both the Unix and Windows versions of VMD to using exactly
      the same GUI, and decreases VMD's code/binary size noticably.
    o Fixed quite a few of the outstanding problem reports (bugs)
      that were sent in on previous versions of VMD.
      PRs fixed: 5, 7, 10, 19, 23, 29, 58, 64, 68, 75, 76, 78,
                 79, 81, 83, 87
    o Rewrote large parts of the VMD display command system.

  User Interface Changes
    o New "Mouse" form which supercedes the old "popup menu" found in
      all of the previous Unix versions of VMD. The Mouse menu is
      identical on both Windows and Unix, unlike the previous versions of
      VMD where the Windows version had no analog to the popup menu.

  New bugs in VMD 1.5a1 which are not fixed yet
    o Rendering to postscript will crash VMD. The Postscript renderer
      in VMD needs to be rewritten to work with the new display list system
      we recently implemented, but this has not been done yet.
    o VMD doesn't work in the CAVE at the moment, we are working on fixing
      this. This is also related to the display list changes.

Thanks for using VMD!!
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
Theoretical Biophysics Group   Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Beckman Institute              http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/
University of Illinois         Phone:  (217) 244-3349
405 N. Mathews  Ave              FAX:  (217) 244-6078 
Urbana, IL 61801, USA          Unix Is Good For You!!!