Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) Announces 500,000 ACD/ChemSketch downloads
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 <a target='_blank' href='http://www.sciencebase.com/aug04_iss.html" target=_blank>feature article by David Bradley published in 2004 outlined reasons for this software’>
ACD/ChemSketch was originally made available as [url=”http://www.acdlabs.com/download/chemsk.html’>freeware in 1998. Now, approximately 7 years later, the 500,000<SUP]TH 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 .
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 <A href=”http://www.acdlabs.com/download/chemsk_freeware_vs_commercial.html]comparison document[/url] 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.
