[Jmol-users] Re: Jmol v7 release

[Rzepa, H. <h....@im...>]

Hello all,

We are accumulating a number of  OS X issues. Jmol is hugely important to
this  OS, since MDL has chosen not to support it with Chime.

Some might be FAQs, so please excuse

a) I used to build an application from the  Jars  by dropping Jmol.jar
into a program called  Jar Bundler. It would then offer a drop down menu
to select what it detected as the  Main class.  Clicking on  "create application"
would then create what is called an application bundle. double clicking that as
with any other application would run  Jmol.    Starting around  Jmol 4 (or maybe
5)  Jar Bundler could not longer detect the  Main class, and attempts to put
it in by hand did not generate any application bundle that would work. Now
the ONLY way to run Jmol on OS X is from the command line as
java -jar jmol.jar   
which for students is pretty inconvenient.   Can anyone recollect any reason why
Jar bundler should now be failing to find the main class?

b) We are struggling with http://jmol.sourceforge.net/scripting.html
on OS X browsers (IE, Safari. icab).  None of the scripts seem to 
want to run.  Turning debug on, we get 
"only objects may be called as functions" (from icab) 

Thus in the section "Enter your RasmolChime script"
the links below will  appear in the box, but pressing 
execute script again produces the error above. I might add that 
the molecules do render (in iCab, IE)  although Safari has some problems
rendering the atoms (but not the bonds). 

Can you cast light on either of these two?
PS We are working hard at converting as much  old Chime/Rasmol script
stuff as we can to Jmol,.

PPS I should know the answer to this, but dont!  The jmol.jar applet
is about  500K in size.  This is a bit too large to routinely ask people to 
download on  "popular" pages where the user might have a modem etc.
I think it should be possible to ask the user (or administrator) to place
this class in a standard  classpath somewhere, and have the system detect
this without downloading the  500k applet each time.  Have you looked into 
this?  
-- 

Henry Rzepa. 
+44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax) 
 http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7  2AZ, UK.