May 2011

Molecules 2.01 now on the App Store

in
May 17, 2011
Molecules icon

A minor update to Molecules, version 2.01, is now on the App Store. This new version fixes some slight bugs with the new rendering engine in 2.0, including a case where the ambient occlusion shading for a model would sometimes appear too dark, as well as some odd glitches when using pinch zooming on a model.

I've also reenabled panning across the model using two fingers, which wasn't working well for 2.0 so I had left it out of the initial release. The way that the panning works has also been tweaked to have zooming and rotation always occur from the center of the screen.

Finally, rendering performance on the iPad 2 has been slightly improved.

Enhancing Molecules using OpenGL ES 2.0

in
May 8, 2011
Molecules icon

The 2.0 version of Molecules brings with it a brand new rendering engine that utilizes OpenGL ES 2.0 to deliver realistic 3-D representations of molecular structures. This is a long way from the original OpenGL ES 1.1 renderer that I first wrote about here, so I want to describe in detail how this new version works. The source code for Molecules is available under the BSD license, so you are free to download the project from the main application page and follow along as I walk through the process.

Read on for a detailed breakdown of the new Molecules renderer.

Molecules 2.0 now on the App Store

in
May 5, 2011
Molecules icon

A major new update to Molecules, version 2.0, is now live on the App Store. This version brings an all-new renderer for newer iOS devices, one that is capable of beautiful, realistic 3-D graphics. You are now able to search the NCBI PubChem database of small molecule compounds, something people have been asking for since the launch of the application. In addition to this, the interface of the application has been streamlined and particularly improved on the iPad. As always, the latest source code of Molecules is available for download.

Read on for more about the new version of Molecules.