Greenshot makes screenshots simple

At one time or another, most people need to capture an image of all or part of what appears on their screen. Many screenshot tools allow you to do that and more – which can make them hard to understand and work with. By contrast, the developers of Greenshot created a lightweight tool that’s quick and easy to use.

With Greenshot, what you see is what you get. You can save a screen or a part of one to any of several image formats within a second. You can also apply text and shapes to the screenshot. “Just have a look at the settings dialog to find out what’s possible beyond default behavior,” advises Jens Klingen, who develops the software with Thomas Braun. “Also, you can make use of the Prnt shortcut keys (including modifiers) if you want to be even faster.”

Greenshot is still in beta, and the developers hope to continue making releases at the rate of about two versions per year. “We have quite a few enhancements on our to-do list, including the ability to capture scrolling windows, zoom for the image editor, and a crop tool and blur filter.”

Pandora never sleeps

You could pay thousands of dollars for a comprehensive enterprise network monitoring application – but you don’t have to. With Pandora FMS (Flexible Monitoring System) you get functionality comparable to that of proprietary applications like Hewlett-Packard’s Network Node Manager, Hyperic HQ, and OpManager, and better-known open source offerings like Zenoss, Zabbix, Nagios, and OpenNMS.

Pandora FMS monitors both systems and applications. It comes with agents for all active Windows platforms (2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7), Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, *BSD, Mac OS, and even Nokia/IPSO. It can collect information several ways (SNMP, TCP, ICMP, WMI, HTTP, SNMP traps) and display it in a powerful web- and AJAX-based centralized management console. (You can read more about Pandora’s features and see an online demo on the project’s web site.)

You might not have heard much about Pandora FMS because the project puts all its resources into development, not publicity. Nevertheless, Pandora FMS is in use in the datacenters of several organizations and corporations, including Brussels University and Cordoba University, as well as huge multinationals in the telecommunications sector and IT companies. Project leader Sancho Lerena says the project will publish the names of more enterprises that are using Pandora FMS on the project’s new web site when it launches version 3.0, for which release candidate code came out last week.

Lerena says he started working on Pandora FMS in 2004, when he needed a flexible, non-intrusive monitoring system that was able to integrate with other apps. “To build Pandora we used PHP and Perl because they offer a lot of libraries which allow us to focus directly on our goals, and avoid construction of additional tools or libraries. We also use AJAX and web technology to make the console user-friendly and powerful. Because PHP and Perl are easy to work with we can improve our code and add new features without a formal heavyweight process of design. Each developer uses his own development tools; there is no official tool we use. Some of us like Eclipse; I myself use gedit to work on code.”

The project posted Pandora’s code on SourceForge.net in 2006 because “SourceForge.net is the most important reference for the OSS community in the world, so we need to be there.”

Lerena says the core team of six developers is working on GIS, better reporting, and a new information architecture engine for advanced data post processing for future releases. “Our version cycle is about nine months. We always need help, mostly on testing, documentation, and translation. The best way to get in touch with us is the developer list.” You can also check out the project’s developer blog and web forums.

Avogadro: The Tyra of molecular modeling

If you’re a chemist, you need to visualize and model molecular information. Avogadro lets you interactively build and edit molecular models on your screen. You can buy commercial applications that let you visualize molecules for upwards of $10,000 per seat, but few of them let you build new molecules or edit existing chemical data, as this open source application can.

With Avogadro you can see in 3-D the shape and structure of chemistry. Want a protein? Want to see a gold surface? Want to build the next great cancer treatment? Avogadro’s the tool for you.

Geoff Hutchison, an assistant professor in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, and Donald Curtis began planning Avogadro in 2006. The project got a big help the following year with a Google Summer of Code project from Marcus Hanwell, who has now become a lead developer. Today, the project is releasing Avogadro 1.0, in honor of its namesake. Avogadro’s number is 6.02×10²³, so chemists often celebrate October 23 as Mole Day.

When he set out to build the application, Hutchison says, “I needed something like Avogadro. I didn’t really see any truly great tools to create molecular models. For my research, it’s the critical first step of doing computational chemistry simulations – you need the molecular data!

“We’ve tried to make the most intuitive program for building chemical systems – molecules, proteins, crystals, nanotubes, whatever. And we’ve made everything modular – almost everything is a plugin – so you can easily add or change functionality. We want Avogadro to be flexible and scale from educational use to advanced research.”

Avogadro is written in C++ and uses the Qt user interface toolkit. “This allows us to have releases on Windows, Mac, and Linux simultaneously. Qt has also really helped out with multithreading our interface – most of the chemistry simulation occurs in the background on multicore machines, which makes the interface much smoother.”

The chemistry side is largely handled by the Open Babel toolkit, since it handles scores of chemistry file formats and data types. Hutchison is also the lead developer for Open Babel.

In Avogadro, if you’re drawing a molecule, you can switch elements, say from from carbon to nitrogen, by just typing the atom symbol. You can also move things around with either the mouse or the arrow keys.

One of the coolest features, Hutchison says, is the auto-optimization tool. “This lets you optimize the geometry of a molecule as you edit or manipulate it. Think of it as running an interactive chemistry simulation. Pull an atom, and the molecule will respond. Drag a molecule around, and you can see others move in response. It’s like a little video game.”

The project makes regular bug-fix releases, and anticipates a major feature release every year. Hutchison also hopes that the Python scripting interface and plugin framework will make it easy for people to add features and extend Avogadro between releases.

Right now, about 15-20 people work on the code, and Hutchison says “we’d love to have more contributors. We could use help with documentation and tutorials (particularly for education), translations, OpenGL rendering optimization, GLSL shaders … We’ve got a list on our wiki actually. Of course people can always contact us on the avogadro-devel@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list.”

Today Avogadro has been adopted by a lot of universities for teaching, but it has also gained traction in the business and research communities. “We will shortly have our first journal cover,” Hutchison says, “and there’s a blog posting about using Avogadro to visualize molecular databases for drug leads.”