Zodiac

Zodiac is a portable software application that allows you to create, design and analyze molecular structures in a user-friendly environment.

Since it's not wrapped in a setup kit, you can save the program files anywhere on the disk and just click the executable to launch Zodiac, as well as copy it to an external removable device to directly run it on any PC effortlessly. Unlike most installers, it doesn't modify Windows registry settings.

The user-friendly interface is represented by a common window with a minimalistic structure, where you can build molecular structures by inserting atoms, bonds, rings, fragments, smiles and groups of amino acids, heterocycles and nucleotides.

These items are added to the project by just clicking them, and you can use the mouse cursor to rotate the objects. You can consult the periodic table, switch to 2D editing mode, view the sequence of molecules, enable or disable clipping, as well as customize the background and backbone colors.

Zodiac lets you start haptic mode or docking, edit and save plants, compute energies, perform a conformational search, add hydrogens, duplicate molecules, create graphical objects, and so on. The project can be saved to file and resumed later, as well as exported to an image file (.ppm format).

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that Zodiac didn't hang, crash or display error dialogs. It had a good response time and left a small footprint on system resources, using low CPU and RAM.

Taking everything into consideration, Zodiac proves to be a resourceful and reliable application for creating, analyzing and exporting molecular compounds.