Balls & Sticks

Description

• Balls & Sticks (BS) is a program to create 3D image and animation of crystal structures. It was designed with the emphasis on "ease of use." It imports CIF files, then polyhedra and bonds can be defined by mouse-cliking on end-member atoms. All the other operations are also implemented via the graphical user interface.
• Minimum system requirement is Microsoft(R) Windows 95(OSR2)/98/NT/2000/XP, Intel(R) Pentium 200MHz class CPU, 32MB RAM, a graphics card/chip with at least 2MB of memory and proper OpenGL support, and a harddisk with more than 10MB of free space. However, for decent performance, it is recommended that the system has at least Microsoft(R) Windows NT/2000/XP, Intel(R) Pentium III 600MHz class CPU, 64MB RAM, a graphics card/chip with at least 4MB of memory and proper OpenGL support, and a harddisk with more than 100MB of free space.
• BS uses CIF file format[1] to import crystallographic date in order to maintain high degree of portability of data among various crystallography software.

[1] CIF dictionary (http://ww1.iucr.org/cif/cifdic_html/1/cif_core.dic/index.html)

BS may not work on newer versions of Windows than XP. In such a case, BS tends to work well if you use Windows Virtual PC.

Citations

We would appreciate if you kindly cite the following in your pulication: T. C. Ozawa; Sung J. Kang; "Balls & Sticks: Easy-to-Use Structure Visualization and Animation Creating Program" J. Appl. Cryst. 37 (2004) 679.

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Sung J. Kang & Tadashi C. Ozawa