Sunday, February 22, 2009

MeTA Studio update and re-factoring plan

First on the re-factoring plan:

After much of though, I have decided to re-factor the graphics engine for MeTA Studio so as to make it more flexible and enable it to use multiple rendering engines at the backend at the same time providing complete UI integration with existing IDE. This will take some substantial amount of time and hence I plan not to update the source release till such time. Only on-line updates will be provided till such time. Any changes to APIs will be reflected in the API documentation that would be shipped with the on-line update.

Current version is more of bug fix release with some new APIs:
- GAMESS/ Gaussian reader now reads more additional information
- Some of these can be see by: Right Click -> Tools -> Additional Information in the MoleculeViewer, there are a number of usability bugs in this code though at the moment.
- Molecule.AdditionalInformation class is updated
- there are other API additions and modifications in org.meta.molecule package (refer to IDE help for mode details).

During the time when graphics engine re-factoring is being done, any features that use graphics framework (for example Frequency visualisation) will be shipped as user scripts, and at a later stage would be integrated into the IDE.

The current version is: 2.0.23022009
The usual UAC note to Vista users apply, you need to start MeTA Studio in admin-mode to update (I plan to fix this in the next full binary update).

Have fun!

(Update: some necessary small updates made the current version to 2.0.24022009)

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