The first official release of the CCP4 graphical user interface, CCP4I 1.0 was announced in April this year. Since then something like 180 sites have downloaded the software from the York FTP site. See the Installation Guide if you have not got the interface yet. It's hard to know how many of the 180 sites are using the Interface for real - I've received feedback from 20-30 sites - some of it even complimentary! So are all the others using it happily without problems or have they not really got into it yet? Please let me know!
Peter Briggs and I have visited several crystallography labs
in the UK to do demos and run mini-workshops to help people get started
using the Interface and we would be very happy to do more so let us know
if you would like us to visit you for a day. We've also done
demos at conferences: the ACA in Buffalo, IUCr in Glasgow, ???????
The interface has been very useful for workshops where participants
may be unfamiliar with CCP4 programs - we used it for the Refinement Workshop
in York in December 1998 (prior to full release of the software).
Pete and I are now working on the next version of the Interface. Projects we are currently working on:
Interfaces to programs that got missed first time around - Sfall, Overlapmap, Detwin, Shelx and interfaces to some of the new programs entering the suite.
Enhancements to the Loggraph program.
A Mapviewer which should replace NPO and xplot84driver for visualising map sections.
A Molecular Sketcher to simplify defining novel ligand molecules which need new entries in the refinement dictionary. (See the article ??????).
Porting the Interface to Windows NT. The basic Interface is now working on NT thanks to the Tcl/Tk porting painlessly. There are a couple of more serious issues.
One problem I find working with the network setup at York is that the same file has different path names seen from Unix or NT machines (and you can get the same problem with an all-Unix system). I expect this is going to be a general problem as people will work in a 'mixed' environment. The interface already uses the idea of project directories and directory aliases and these need to be made a bit more flexible to cope with different machine domains.
The other possible issue with NT is that it does not support the
rsh command (or anything similar) which the Interface uses to run
remote jobs on Unix systems. The solution to this may be to
run a 'CCP4I server' on the 'remote' machine. I would be interested
to hear from anyone who has any ideas on what would be useful or possible
solutions.