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ACD/ChemSketch Reaches
the 100,000 Download Mark!
Dr Antony Williams,
VP of Scientific Development and Marketing |
It is indeed a strange and wonderful world when it comes to the development of software for the cheminformatics world. Just a few years ago scientists were pleasantly surprised by chemical structure drawing software that was rather primitive relative to what is available today. Now however the demands for high levels of capability are only to be expected, and not solely for the application to simple organic molecules but also to polymers, biomolecules and inorganic complexes, to name a few. Today chemical structure drawing software is very much a commodity market. There are a number of popular commercial packages including Cambridgesoft ChemDraw, Sadtler's ChemWindows, MDL's ISIS and our own ACD/ChemSketch. There are also a plethora of freeware structure drawing tools for download via the internet including Java Structure Drawing Applets. Such tools owe much of their success to the availability of defined standards for molecular structure drawing handling, allowing interchange between packages, and the continuing drive to enable the packages in new environments, specially the web, and make the user interfaces more facile and powerful.
In June 1998 ACD decided to make the ACD/ChemSketch program available as freeware. Advanced Chemistry Development offers an integrated product line of solutions for chemists as listed in Table 1:
Table 1. ACD/Labs solutions for chemists
In each of these software products the ability to utilize a structure drawing interface for inputting chemical structures as the basis of prediction, for attachment to a spectrum or chromatogram, or as the input for a structure or substructure search, was required. ChemSketch is the integrating product between all ACD tools and can be considered as the browser in the world of ACD. What better way to make the world aware of the capabilities of ACD software for cheminformatics than to give away the browser?
On May 10th ACD celebrated the download of the 100,000th copy of ChemSketch freeware from their website. With an average of 35,000 demo CDs delivered around the world per year, each with a copy of ChemSketch available for installation, and the thousands of ACD customers worldwide already using the interface, the conservative user base for ChemSketch numbers more than a quarter of million users today. The lucky 100,000th downloader of ACD/ChemSketch freeware was Dr. John Minatelli of DSM Catalytica Pharmaceuticals, NC, USA. He will receive a significant prize - a site license of ChemSketch!. Congratulations, Dr. Minatelli!
Figure 1. Downloads of ChemSketch
Downloads also continue at anaverage of 170 ChemSketch freeware copies per day, and a total transfer of over 2 Gbytes of software per day of all freeware, including new ChemSketch templates, the 3D Viewer (see Figure 2), integrated spectral viewers and ACD/ChemBasic. ACD/ChemBasic is a programming language connected to ChemSketch, the ACD Chemical "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". It allows the customization of ACD software, or connection of user programs to the ACD interface. It is a true macro programming language, with common statements and functions for dealing with numbers or texts; also, built-in molecular objects and functions to manipulate them. A ChemBasic macro can, for example, can get a shorthand formula, e.g., of an oligosaccharide like GalNAc(alpha1-3)Gal(beta1-4)[Fuc(alpha1-3)]Glc(betaOMe), convert it into a ChemSketch diagram, perform conformational analysis and depict the most probable 3D-structures. Many sample programs can be downloaded as freeware from our website since ACD users love to spread the word regarding their ChemBasic tools!
 Figure 2. 3D Viewer
The freeware version of ChemSketch is also integrated to the ACD/I-Lab. This enables the desktop drawing tool to access the strength of ACD prediction modules online at our central server as shown in Figure 3. When the user has logged into the I-Lab, a number of menus become available for systematic naming, physicochemical property prediction, NMR prediction and database searching by structure and substructure. An example screen shot is shown below. Although this is a commercial service, certain properties are available at no charge including ACD/IUPAC names from chemical structures. Presently this service generates about 200 IUPAC Names per day. To access this service visit http://ilab.acdlabs.com/ .
Figure 3. Integration of ChemSketch with ACD prediction modules
The worldwide web has truly been the enabling technology in allowing the worldwide distribution of ChemSketch according to the statistical map below. We have confirmed users of ChemSketch, not just downloaders, in such far-flung places as Cote d'Ivoire, the Cook Islands, the Wallis and Fortuna Islands, Uzbekistan, Tonga, Paraguay and Qatar to name only a few. According to our per capita statistics, ChemSketch seems to be most frequently downloaded by citizens of Canada, Mexico, Finland and Portugal.
 In July of this year, 2001, we will release version 5.0 of ChemSketch with new capabilities including SMILES generation, PDF export, a vastly expanded Dictionary, and many new templates of glassware and chemical classes. The freeware will be made available about a month later. We expect that ChemSketch will continue its steady ascent toward becoming the premier chemical structure software and that feedback from our users will continue to motivate us to innovate and improve its capabilities. As it is, we are proud to have benefited the scientific community with one of the best chemical structure drawing tools available today!
Click here to see past winners.
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