Chemistry apps

By Zerojojo at Thu, Apr 24 2008 9:50am |

Hello,
I'm a student of Food Chemistry and I need to create organic molecules and reactions for my lab work. I basically need a chemistry writer for the papers I have to hand in. Is there any free Mac software that can do that? All I could find was the really expensive stuff like Chemdraw.
Thanks a lot!

Regards
Johannes

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Thu, 2008-04-24 10:49 — drc

Chemical drawing

ChemDraw really sets the standard for chemical drawing and is still the best for publication quality graphics, if you search around the website there are academic offers

http://scistore.cambridgesoft.com/software/product.cfm?pid=25

There are alternatives Marvin from ChemAxon is probably the best known, but there is also Chemistry 4-D Draw from ChemInnovation.

Thu, 2008-04-24 13:39 — ghutchis

ChemDoodle

I came across another program recently. It's officially Java, but it looks really good by the screenshots. The program is called ChemDoodle and it's shareware for $39, with a 14-day demo.

There's also XDrawChem (which has been abandoned) and molSketch (beta and maybe abandoned?) which are open source.

Thu, 2008-04-24 16:43 — LeninWTigger

A quick list from fink

This are the "chem" programs i found in fink:

bkchem

chemtool

easychem

xdrawchem

They are unix apps, they are free and fink makes the work in mac os x.
I have only (and briefly) used chemtool, so I have no particular recommendation.

Thu, 2008-04-24 19:46 — ghutchis

UNIX apps

There's also GChemPaint if you're talking about UNIX apps.

Thu, 2008-04-24 20:18 — LeninWTigger

GChemPaint

GChemPaint looks nice! As I mentioned, I am not a heavy user of any of this programs. Can somebody make a comment on file formats and compatability?

Thu, 2008-04-24 21:23 — ghutchis

File Formats via Open Babel

Most of the open source applications use the Open Babel library for chemical file format interconversion. So MDL Molfile and ChemDraw CDX are fairly well supported, along with Chemical Markup Language, etc.

When we update Open Babel, all these other programs benefit. (Truth in advertising -- I'm the Open Babel maintainer.)

But I'll be honest. I haven't seen a truly excellent open source chemical drawing program. Hopefully sometime soon there will be one.

ChemDraw is really impressive. You should also check out Marvin Sketch, and ChemDoodle, which are mentioned above.