LociOiling Lv 1
The Reaction Design tool has made a surprise appearance in puzzle 2467 after a long absence.
The good news is that the tool seems to be well-behaved, I haven't seen any crashes so far. I'll note a couple of glitches or bugs separately.
The tool still has some of the same limitations as when it was last seen, and perhaps some new ones.
It's very hard to tell which reactants are selected:
- a dark gray (41 101 101) is used to highlight selections
- the highlighting on the top row, which scrolls horizontally, is only 3 pixels wide, and only covers part of the vertical edges of each reactant
- the highlighting on the column below is still only 6 pixels wide, but does cover all edges of the reactant
- there don't seem to be any settings in theme.txt related to reaction design
The Reaction Design panel can be expanded vertically, but not horizontally. This is unfortunate, since the top row contains 11 reactants.
The Reaction Design panel shows about 3.25 reactants in the column at its default size.
On a 3840x2160 display, the column can show 9 reactants at a time when the Reaction Design panel is expanded to its maximum height.
The Reaction Design panel reverts to its default size each time a selection is made in the top row.
The Reaction Design panel always opens at its default size.
Reactants are identified only by their preview images. For the top row, the previews are only 210x192 pixels. The column has larger previews, about 436x178. The previews don't increase in size when the Reaction Design panel is expanded.
Reactant previews can be zoomed and rotated, but position information is not retained. For example, if you select a different reactant in the top row, then go back to a previous reactant, all the previews in the column below have returned to their default orientations.
Atoms in reactants are color-coded, but the coloring is ambiguous at times.
Since there's no text associated with reactants, it can be difficult to keep track of the position when scrolling.
There's no Lua interface for selecting reactants.
Suggestions:
- brighter, wider highlighting for reactants
- settings in theme.txt to control reactant highlighting
- allow expanding Reaction Design panel horizontally as well as vertically
- retain size and position of Reaction Design panel versus defaulting size each time opened
- add numbers or letters to identify reactants in each row and column (just 1, 2, 3 would help)
- display additional info for each reactant, similar to small molecule properties (via hover?)
- display SMILES and chemical formula for each reactant
- add Lua functions to determine number of reactants available and allow loading reactants
- persist the orientation of reactant previews (?)
- scale reactant previews when the Reaction Design panel is expanded, as with Rama map (?)