On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:42 PM, James <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I've used Avogadro here and there because of its great interface. But, I > can't rely upon it because it crashes for me *all the time*. Originally I > thought it was only with large models, but recently I've been playing with > models of less than 1000 atoms and it still happens. This is on Windows 7. > I've scanned some of the recent threads and it looks like stability issues > in 1.1.0 are known. Which leads me to 2 questions: > > Are the Linux versions more stable? > Is another release planned any time soon to address stability?
I compiled the 1.1.0 release on Windows 7 using a more recent version of Qt, which I had hoped would help reduce the number of crashes on Windows. We are aware of issues crashing, and as Jens pointed out this is part of the motivation for Avogadro 2, along with a wish to scale to larger systems and provide a more flexible and robust platform for the future. I have not spent that much time tracking down the causes of the crashes in 1.1.0 recently, although I was hoping to put together a new release soon I am not sure it will improve the number of crashes as it has not received much active development time (that I am aware of). > > I love the interface - just want to be able to use it without constant fear > of losing my most recent changes in a crash. I agree, and that is a major reason I want us to be better as a community. We had a few attempts to get rid of all of the crashers in Avogadro before releasing 1.0. I am not sure how much time I will have to focus in 1.1, but can say 2 is more stable (but with many features currently missing - something we are working to address). > > On an unrelated note, one suggestion I have is to improve atom choice for > bonding. I find that I bind to the wrong atom fairly often (maybe it's just > me!). Normally I bind to something which is behind the atom I intended, and > if the angle is bad, it can even be hard to see you made a mistake. I think > there are several ways to address this, such as: > > 1) Make the "from" and "to" atom highlighting very obvious. Rather than just > snapping the bond to the atom (which is hard to interpret with many atoms, > and when there are atoms in front of, or behind, the atom of interest), make > the atom change color, glow, dance... ;) That sounds like a great idea, I will try to come up with something. You can already see which atom we will snap to, but highlighting the from and to shouldn't be that difficult and would provide a really nice visual cue. > > 2) Have a preference for atoms that are in front. For example, if one atom > partially occludes another atom, the atom in front gets some preference in > the snap-to algorithm. If one atom totally occludes another atom, it is > almost a certainty that the user means the atom in front. (Maybe the ideal > algorithm takes into account how much overlap there is - but since these are > rendering rather than model details, I'm not sure how available this > information is). Yes, this would make it harder to bind to > partially-occluded atoms, but how often is that really the intent? I tend to > spin or zoom my model to make the atom(s) of interest very visible - but > perhaps other people do not. This might be a little tougher to implement, but I will see if I can come up with anything. Thanks for the suggestions. > > Thanks for a nice piece of software! Thanks for the comments, and we are honestly working on crashing less (and I fully appreciate your frustration and anxiety with crashes). Marcus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Avogadro-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/avogadro-devel
