
Show HN: CanvasMol molecule viewer (JS + canvas demo) - bd
http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/
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tzury

        very cool. 
        one missing feature I have noticed is a permalink option. so one can have a 
        specific one (or more) loaded with the page. 
        
        e.g. "http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/#aspirin would load the aspirin 
        presentation. 
        
        this can be useful If one wish to send a direct link to that particular item.

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bd
Thanks for the suggestion, I just added quick and dirty permalinks.

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kurtosis
Hey this is pretty impressive - for a web browser. It gets a little bogged
down when you have 3 molecule windows open, but I'm only using firefox.

What is the point of the periodic table window? Does this have a function?

Something like this would make a very nice interface to the protein data
bank..

I'm a frequent pyMOL user and there are many things missing. Can you save to
pdf or PNG?

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bd
Periodic table shows colors of elements (I used ones from Jmol).

No exports yet, though in Firefox you can save any canvas element as PNG just
by right clicking on it. Maybe for other browsers I could add PNG export via
data URI.

Proteins are tough. When you get into thousands of atoms, performance is
unsatisfactory, it's pushing browsers to limits.

Firefox is especially problematic because of weird memory behavior - it's
growing a lot (on simple array assignments) and then it stutters on garbage
collecting.

Chrome is much better, though interestingly for the most complex molecules new
Opera is the fastest.

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Edit: I added PNG export.

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rdoherty
Firefox nightlies run quite well, ~35fps on MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo. No
stuttering.

Edit: 60fps for one molecule, 35 for two.

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ableal
Firefox 3.5 Linux, PhenomII 3GHz (ATI SB700 built-in graphics): two molecules
at unsteady rates, mostly 30 to 60 fps. Nice work, thanks.

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slug
Looks pretty cool, although it makes my N cpu y.yGHz machine crawl. It's sad
that 10 years ago(?) people where doing this kind of things with java applets
and it actually worked better.

EDIT: I initially tested with konqueror. Now with chrome , it's faster, but I
found some strange behaviour when closing windows, as it makes some of the
other windows jump to a different position.

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jey
> Now with chrome , it's faster,

A benefit of v8, Chrome's JS interpreter.

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carussell
What makes you sure it's not the painting code or the performance of the
canvas APIs themselves that are causing issue?

