Show HN: CanvasMol molecule viewer (JS + canvas demo) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CanvasMol molecule viewer (JS + canvas demo)

alteredqualia.com

72 pointsbd11 comments

    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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

Chrome ~200fps i7 2.6GHz

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

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.

> Now with chrome , it's faster,

A benefit of v8, Chrome's JS interpreter.

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

10 years ago people were still using Chime. Then Jmol arrived and instead of having to install a proprietary browser plugin, we could wait 30 seconds for the JVM to load. Now we just need some more 3D acceleration for Canvas and we can eliminate that wait as well.

It's a bit slow, but still progress.

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