The days of Chime are coming to a close. Our thanks to MDL for years of happy designing and viewing, and their tremendous contribution to the community. In its early years, Chime was usable with Windows and Mac operating systems and with both Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers--a Golden Age, in retrospect. Although these 'historic' operating systems and browsers still function with Chime, among more modern options, limited development has basically pruned the field to only Win98/2k/XP and IE5.5 or better, thereby excluding OS10 and Linux operating systems and the Safari, Netscape, and Mozilla browsers. Further, there is user resistance to downloading plugins, particularly when a somewhat cold and unfriendly registration is required beforehand. From a designer's viewpoint, it may be noted that Chime added no significant chemical features in the last 5 yrs or so, despite numerous requests.
To the rescue comes Jmol, an open source Java applet that in v10 intends to be not only a molecular visualization applet but a Chime-compatible visualization applet that will cross numerous operating system and browser combinations. This will rescue much of the Chime materials produced to date, including this 'Virtual Museum of Minerals and Molecules'. It will also allow for automatic download of the applet, its 'sticky' residence in browser cache, and its silent update when new features are added.
In spite of best efforts, some combinations of user equipment will not function properly with our Jmol-enabled displays, at least not right out of the box. Please inform us of any difficulties you may have...particularly computer type, operating system and version, browser and version. Where possible, please attempt to use two different browsers on the same machine so that we can sort out software issues.