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Software releases are in some ways like birthdays. When someone turns 40, it’s not like they woke up one day and were a year older than when they were 39. And certainly, they didn’t wake up on their birthday, suddenly becoming “in their 40s” rather than “in their 30s.” They’re really just a day older, but we mark that birthday as a milestone of sorts.

So it’s fitting that one of my “midnight projects,” Open Babel just had a birthday and a milestone release (2.0).

I work on Open Babel in my free time, because it’s fun (no, really!) and it’s a way of paying back to the chemistry community at large. I actually think that the existence of Babel and similar chemistry software projects have saved me more time in increased productivity than I’ve spent in the evenings writing code.

Oh, for those wondering what Open Babel does, here’s a quick synopsis…

OpenBabel is a project designed to pick up where Babel left off, as a cross-platform program and library designed to interconvert between many file formats used in molecular modeling, computational chemistry and related areas.

Highlights of the 2.0 release include a new conversion framework making it easier to develop new translators, dramatically improved support for merging, splitting, and batch conversion, a framework for molecular fingerprints, similarity searching, a fast molecular database format, support for Perl and Python scripting “wrappers,” automatic support for reading .gz (gzip) compressed files, support for the new IUPAC/NIST InChI identifiers and more.