There’s no message that says “you have successfully downloaded” — perhaps you mean the message that comes up after installation which says “You have successfully installed ChemSpotlight.”

This tool works in the background. If you go to the File menu, then “File > Get Info” on a chemical file, there’s a section labeled “More Info” which should show bits like the snapshot above.

ChemSpotlight is not (yet) any sort of molecular viewer. It’s not a program, it’s a plugin to the Mac OS. It means you can click the little blue Spotlight menu in the top right corner and type in a chemical formula and have it find chemical files. It means that other programs can search molecular data.

If you want a free molecular viewer for Mac OS X, I highly suggest iMol, which is free and readily opens most formats like PDB, .mol2, .xyz, .mol…

Sorry if you misunderstood what ChemSpotlight does — any suggestion for how to change the webpage or documentation? At some point, it probably will have a viewer program too, but that wasn’t its original aim.

Where?!? From my attempts to use the “sample files” it seems fairly obvious that where-ever ChemSpotlight has successfully downloaded itself, it’s not self-opening, and thus far I haven’t been able to find it either.

When I had Windows 98 I used to use PDB without any problem. Now that I’ve got a mac Intel, I’ve got the promise of being able to use more than a half dozen different types of chem banks, and the reality of nothing.
Sincerely frustrated;

Patrick Fuller

I have made a perl-script to enhance the excellent ChemSpotlight with substructure searching. The script in itself translates the output from mdfind into a valid smiles-file that could be searched using obgrep….

I’m glad to receive some positive feedback on this little project!

In August 2006 I downloaded “ChemSpotlight 1.0.1″ with metapackage:
May 31 09:23:29 2006 ChemSpotlight.mpkg

Inside the mpkg are two packages:

(1.) The OpenBabel v 2.0.1 package:
May 18 21:58:05 2006 OpenBabel.pkg

(2.) The ChemSpotlight v1.0.1 package:
May 31 09:22:41 2006 ChemSpotlight.pkg
with posgtflight script: 66 Aug 6 15:34 postflight

Thank you for all the excelent work on ChemSpotlight as well as OpenBabel!

Below are a few suggestions, FWIW…

Since iBabel can use ChemSpotlight, maybe provide space at ibabel
SourceForge site so ChemSpotlight could be downloaded from Sourceforge?

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=40728

So what we would have is ibabel is, among other things, a gui-tool that can perform open-babel tasks, and can also make use of ChemSpotlight.

In fact, ideally, instead of bundling an openbabel.pkg in the meta-package,
a simple script using curl or wget to get and install the newest openbabel
might be prefereed.

Three more detailed suggestions (A.) (B.) and (C.) are below.

(A.) I think the postflight script needs to be changed like so:

FROM

!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/mdimport -r /Library/ChemSpotlight.mdimporter

TO

!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/mdimport -r /Library/SpotLight/ChemSpotlight.mdimporter

(May also need to ensure last line ends with a “NewLine”).

(B.) I would ask that the ChemSpotLight.pkg install into /Applications a “ChemSpotlight” folder containing the Readme.rtfd file along with the Extras and Samples folders. The postflight script could be added to Extras folder as reindex.command file.

(C.) Please make available for seperate download just the ChemSpotlight.pkg WITHOUT the OpenBabel (for those who already have OpenBabel).

I think folks are much more likely to pay attention and download an appropriate installer, rather than to rely on them remebering to choose “Custom” and uncheck OpenBabel.

Many end-users may not remember they have OpenBabel 2.0.2 or newer installed in /usr/local (such as the universal binary version 2.0.2). And they may not bother to view the excelent ReadMe telling themto choose “Custom” to uncheck OpenBabel. In such cases, the mpkg will overwrite the newer OpenBabel with it’s v2.0.1.

One way to prevent would be if the installer were smart enough to look in /Library/Receipts
for any of these 2:

” OpenBabel.pkg” (the receipt left by v2.0.2 pkg. NOTE: name starts with space ” “.)

“OpenBabel.pkg” (a receipt whose name does NOT start with a leading space ” “).

Anyone know the reason for the leading-space in the ” OpenBabel.pkg” name?

Also, it might make more sense for the OpenBabel.pkg to drop the man files in
/usr/local/share/man rather than /usr/local/man

Upon finding a receipt for a newer version, it should at least warn, right?
But I’m not sure that the installer can be relied upon to do this in all cases.

So, if installer cannot do dependency checks per above, there
may be a way for the installer of the mpkg to check if /usr/local/bin/babel exists.

And if it exists, see if the version is already newer than what is in .mpkg package.

/usr/local/bin/babel –version
No output file or format spec!
Open Babel 2.0.2 — Jun 5 2006 — 14:38:46

If newer, it would be nice to prevent overwriting of the newer openbabel with an older.