Re: [Jmol-users] Sliders to control Chime -> Jmol?

[Albion B. <ba...@bi...>]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Eric Martz wrote:

Hi Eric,

> Now that java seems to be in a better place than years ago when you made
> those nifty java applet slider controls for Chime, can they be adapted to
> jmol? Are the source codes available?

Yah, I actually went as far as to begin adopting them to Jmol, but got a
lukewarm responce on using Java based widgets in the page. I got the
feeling from a few people on the list that there were more efficient ways
to implement sliders to control Jmol attributes.

For those of you who don't know about my prior work with Chime, I created
Java applets that could interactively control display attributes via
sliders and checkboxes. For instance a slider could control the
"spacefill" attribute and you could "dial in" the size you wanted in real
time by dragging the slider. You could "target" more than one model in
more than one frame and have them all respond at the same time to the
slider values. People still use the java based sliders, but unfortunately
it requires the last release of Netscape 4.x since it relies on Chime
plugin support, and LiveConnect functionality that isn't fully supported
in Internet Explorer.

Here is an example of my Jmol ports of the Chime sliders (that uses an old
version of Jmol unfortunately, but it demonstates what I was doing)

http://rna.ucsc.edu/albion/jmol

Anyone interested in these?

I am reluctant to release the source code at the moment because it has no
comments (at a minimum author and funding), and needs to be documented
further.  If I find true interest in this project, I could be motivated to
comment, document, implement and release the source code. Oh yah, the
event models are all the old style because I wrote these in the late '90s
before Jave 1.2 and the "listener" event model appeared, so the code needs
some updating too (in fact originally I wrote my own custom slider because
the sliders in the AWT at the time were so buggy, fortunately Swing has
provided some more robust slider implementations).

Cheers,

Albion

Albion E. Baucom
http://rna.ucsc.edu/albion