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In June 1998 Advanced Chemistry Development, ACD/Labs, made the ACD/ChemSketch chemical structure drawing program available as freeware. Now, just over 4 years later, ACD/Labs is proud to announce that on October 15, 2002 the 200,000th copy of the award winning and highly reviewed software was downloaded by Mr. Boris Nachtsheim from Frankfurt, Germany. Antony Williams, VP of Scientific Development and Marketing, comments, "When we released ACD/ChemSketch we believed that chemists worldwide would benefit from the quality of our drawing software. While we certainly feel validated, we are incredibly proud to be recognized with the ongoing feedback and comments from the users. Their requests for enhancements continue to keep us active in developing the premier molecular structure drawing software."
ACD/ChemSketch is the most capable molecular drawing software available today. The capability to further enable the software with the ACD/ChemBasic programming language add on has allowed the community of users to participate in the enhancement of the package with custom-designed tools. ACD/ChemBasic is a programming language connected to ChemSketch, the ACD/Labs Chemical "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". It allows the customization of ACD/Labs software or connection of user programs to the ACD/Labs 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.
Our support of education has enabled ACD/ChemSketch to become the primary educational software for chemical representation used today.
Downloads continue at an average of 200 ChemSketch freeware copies per day, and a total transfer of over 4 Gbytes of ACD/freeware, including new ChemSketch templates, the 3D Viewer, integrated spectral viewers, and ACD/ChemBasic.
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/Labs prediction modules online at our central server. When the user has logged into 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 I-Lab visit http://ilab.acdlabs.com/.
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.
The commercial version of ACD/ChemSketch, version 6.0, provides a series of significant enhancements relative to the Freeware. These include support of Markush structures and polymers, and direct export of Adobe PDF files to produce structure-searchable PDF files. The commercial software also includes a Dictionary containing over 90,000 names and many new templates of glassware and chemical classes. The commercial software can be purchased by contacting us or a distributor in your area.
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!
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