Dear PyMOL Users: Happy New Year! 2001 was a great year for PyMOL, with the following developments: cartoon ribbons, improved rendering quality, transparency, CCP4 maps, concise atom selections, increased stability, bug fixes, and many other minor improvements. According to SourceForge's updated statistics, PyMOL has accumulated about 75,000 web-page hits, 15,000 file downloads, and 72 subscribers to the mailing list. Hooray!
Given this wonderful response, I intend to continue developing PyMOL as a hobby in 2002 under the same unrestricted software license. Some of my goals include: updated documentation, tutorials, a better user interface and API, an improved builder with structure clean-up, MOL2 file support, electrostatic potential display, generalized volumetric rendering, a native OSX version, and an ActiveX control (to replace Chime). Although PyMOL is free and unrestricted, the reality of software development is that it takes substantial time and money. If you haven't yet considered whether it would be in your interest to support PyMOL with a monetary donation, then please do so today! DeLano Scientific can now take donations via credit card or check, or we can even sell your company or institution a standard software license -- whatever is most convenient. Details at http://www.pymol.org/donate.html Even if you are cash-poor, there are many others ways in which you can advance the PyMOL vision. See the "contribute" section of the home page for more information on what you can do. As an individual scientist, I am striving to make the PyMOL vision a reality, but it will not happen unless many other scientists join me in this quest. As of today, only 2 parties have made donations, and 3 more have made pledges. Less than ten people have directly contributed to development. This is a good start, but let us turn this promising little snowball into a roaring avalanche which validates the PyMOL approach for developing free and unrestricted research software. Join me in taking a stand against outrageously expensive commercial research tools. Working together as individual scientists, we can create free and unrestricted alternatives. Please support PyMOL today! Cheers, Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D. PyMOL Creator DeLano Scientific San Carlos, CA, USA
