MOLDRAW: a program to display and manipulate molecular and crystalline structures

by Piero UGLIENGO  University of Torino - Dipartimento Chimica. Via P. Giuria 7 -10125 Torino. ITALY

MS Windows (Linux & Mac OS X) - http://www.moldraw.unito.it  

Running MOLDRAW under Mac OS X

MOLDRAW is natively developed using Microsoft Visual Basic 6 under Microsoft Windows operating system. Nevertheless, MOLDRAW can also be run under Mac OS X  operating systems in many different ways of increasing complexity for the end user.

The simplest method is to run MOLDRAW under commercial  Parallel or VMware Fusion or the free Oracle VirtualBox desktop virtualizing programs. With these programs the result is guarantee with the advantage that any other Microsoft Windows based program can be run as well.

An extremely cheap alternative is to use WinOnX (5 USD $) available on the Mac Apple Store. In the image below MOLDRAW is shown running under WinOnX (thanks to Prof. Javier Torres, Colegio de Ciencias e Ingeniera - El Politecnico, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador).

A completely free of charge alternative is to install MOLDRAW under Wine, as described in the Linux section. The needed steps (8 as a whole) are available here for download as a pdf file (thanks to Dr. Pieremanuele Canepa, Wake Forest University, Department of Physics, Winston-Salem, NC 27109 (USA)).

Pieremanuele Canepa (now at MIT, Department of Material Science and Engineering, USA) has provided a way to pack Wine & MOLDRAW in a single .dmg file so that it is enough to do dowload this file and install on your Mac following the same steps for installing a regular OSX application.

As MOLDRAW is a native Windows application the OSX version running under Wine should be used with caution.

An even more simple and completely free alternative is to adopt PlayOnMac (http://www.playonmac.com/en/) software which is able to run MOLDRAW following a fool proof interactive procedure. I thank Luis Rodriguez Santiago at UAB (ES) for highlighting this solution.

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