In little more than a year and a month, 150,000 downloads of ACD/ChemSketch freeware
have taken place. There is no doubt that the package is enabling chemists worldwide
to use computers to their full effect for producing publication quality chemical
structures for reports and publications. The feature
article by David Bradley published in 2004 outlined reasons for this software's
growing popularity through interviews with chemists from around the world who
have chosen ACD/ChemSketch as their drawing package of choice. ACD/ChemSketch
is used by an ever greater segment of the scientific community.
ACD/ChemSketch was originally made available as freeware in
1998. Now, approximately 7 years later, the 500,000th copy of our award winning
and highly
reviewed software has been downloaded. Antony Williams, VP of Scientific
Development and Marketing, comments, "Version to version ACD/ChemSketch
continues to develop in capability. Based on the valuable feedback and comments
from our users in the scientific community, we continue to pursue our
aim of being the structural representation standard. The development efforts
are driven by users' input and our desire to ever expand chemistry horizons.
Our structure databasing software ACD/ChemFolder,
and our structure database display on both the Palm and Pocket PC platforms
provides truly Mobile Chemistry™. In Version 8 we started our path to produce
complete solutions for polymer and organometallic chemists."
Our support of education has enabled ACD/ChemSketch to become the primary educational
software for chemical representation used today. Many schools around
the world have accepted donations of site licenses of our Freeware and standardized
on ACD/ChemSketch.
Downloads continue at an average of over 500 ChemSketch freeware copies per
day, and a total transfer of over 10 Gbytes of ACD/Labs Freeware, including
new ChemSketch templates, the 3D
Viewer and ACD/ChemBasic.
The freeware version of ChemSketch is also integrated to ACD/Labs
Online (I-Lab). This enables the desktop drawing tool to access the
strength of ACD/Labs prediction modules online at our central server. When
the user has logged into I-Lab, a number of menus become available for systematic
naming, physicochemical property prediction, NMR prediction, and database
searching by structure and substructure. Although this is a commercial service,
certain properties are available at no charge including ACD/IUPAC names from
chemical structures. Presently this service generates about 200 IUPAC Names
per day. To access I-Lab, visit http://www2.acdlabs.com/ilab/.
ACD/ChemSketch freeware was selected as a Chemistry 2005 and 2004 Readers'
Choice Award Finalist by Scientific
Computing & Instrumentation magazine. Readers vote for their favorite
products based on quality, reliability, and value. ChemSketch is also available
as a commercial product; view this comparison
document detailing the differences.
The worldwide Web has truly been the enabling technology in allowing the worldwide
distribution of ACD/ChemSketch. At present we have over 90,000 downloaders
in the United States, >32,000 in Germany, >20,000 in the UK and Canada, >15,000 in France and Denmark, and >10,000 in each of India, China
and Brazil, and Italy. ChemSketch has now been downloaded to every country
in the world, including confirmed users in places such as Cote d'Ivoire, the
Cook Islands, the Wallis and Fortuna Islands, Uzbekistan, Tonga, Paraguay,
and Qatar, to name only a few. Every month more
schools roll out site
licenses. There are a total of over 200 site licenses now installed.
The commercial version of ACD/ChemSketch, version 9.0, provides a series of significant
enhancements relative to the Freeware. These include structure searching
of documents containing molecular structures, direct export to structure-searchable
Adobe PDF files, a built-in calculator for determining reagents and product
quantities, and a Dictionary containing
over 140,000 names. We expect that ACD/ChemSketch will continue its steady
ascent toward becoming the premier chemical structure drawing software and
that feedback from our users will continue to motivate us to innovate and
improve its capabilities. As it is, we are proud to have benefited the scientific
community with one of the best chemical structure drawing tools available
today! We look forward to continuing to serve and work with the scientific
community to bring out the best chemistry has to offer. |
