Every few months we celebrate another 50,000 downloads of our ACD/ChemSketch freeware. There is no doubt that the package is enabling chemists worldwide to use computers to their full effect for producing publication quality chemical structures for reports and publications. A recent chemistry feature article by David Bradley includes interviews with chemists from around the world who have chosen ACD/ChemSketch as their drawing package of choice. Now we have the opportunity to celebrate 350,000 downloads!
ACD/ChemSketch was originally made available as freeware in 1998. Now, almost 5 years later, the 350,000th copy of our award winning and highly reviewed software has been downloaded. Antony Williams, VP of Scientific Development and Marketing, comments, "Version to version ACD/ChemSketch continues to develop in capability. Based on the valuable feedback of our users, especially the comments of our freeware users, we continue to pursue our aim of being the structural representation standard. Our structure databasing software ACD/ChemFolder, and our structure database display on both the Palm and Pocket PC platforms provides truly Mobile Chemistry™. The ongoing feedback and comments from our users continues to drive our development forward. In Version 8 we started our path to produce complete solutions for polymer and organometallic chemists."
Our support of education has enabled ACD/ChemSketch to become the primary educational software for chemical representation used today. Many schools around the world have accepted donations of site licenses of our Freeware and standardized on ACD/ChemSketch.
Downloads continue at an average of 300 ChemSketch freeware copies per day, and a total transfer of over 4 Gbytes of ACD/Labs Freeware, including new ChemSketch templates, the 3D Viewer, integrated spectral viewers, and ACD/ChemBasic.
The freeware version of ChemSketch is also integrated to ACD/Labs Online (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. As well, until October 1, 2004, all new ACD/Labs Online site license subscriptions will receive a free perpetual site license of the commercial version of ACD/ChemSketch v8! Presently this service generates about 200 IUPAC Names per day. To access I-Lab, visit http://www2.acdlabs.com/ilab/.
ACD/ChemSketch freeware was recently selected as a Chemistry 2004 Readers' Choice Award Finalist by Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine. Readers vote for their favorite products based on quality, reliability, and value. ChemSketch is also available as a commercial product; view this comparison document detailing the differences.
The worldwide web has truly been the enabling technology in allowing the worldwide distribution of ACD/ChemSketch according to the statistical map below. At present we have over 70,000 downloaders in the United States, > 25,000 in Germany, >15,000 in the UK and Canada, >10,000 in France and Denmark, and >7000 in each of India, Australia, Brazil, and Italy. ChemSketch has now been downloaded to every country in the world, including confirmed users in places such as Cote d'Ivoire, the Cook Islands, the Wallis and Fortuna Islands, Uzbekistan, Tonga, Paraguay, and Qatar, to name only a few. Every month more schools role out site licenses.
The commercial version of ACD/ChemSketch, version 8.0, provides a series of significant enhancements relative to the Freeware. These include structure searching of documents containing molecular structures, support of Markush structures and polymers, and direct export of Adobe PDF files to produce structure-searchable PDF files. Version 8 now holds a unique place in the industry in terms of supporting organometallic complex structure representation as evidenced in this short article. The commercial software also includes a Dictionary containing over 120,000 names and many new templates of glassware and chemical classes. 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! We'll likely see you here in the next few months as we celebrate 400,000 downloads and our target of ½ million before the end of 2006!
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