iSpartan User Reviews

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  • It's Great and Easy to Use

    I have used a number of different molecular modeling programs in the teaching of chemistry at both the high school and college level. Chemistry tends to be one of those sciences that students find a bit abstract because you are dealing with concepts that students have difficulty visualizing. iSpartan allows students to construct molecules, manipulate them, and gather information like bond angles and bond lengths. Students can view molecules in a variety of formats and get a feeling for electron distribution in the molecule. If you want, you can email the molecule you have constructed to yourself in Spartan 10 format and actually create a QuickTime movie that you can include in a PowerPoint or ActivInspire flipchart, students love that. It is a great classroom tool, and it truly gets the students involved in some solid chemistry.
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  • Excellent Implementation!

    I've used several computational chemistry packages, including Spartan on a Macintosh, for years. Spartan has always had one of the easiest to use interfaces for entering chemical structures and setting up calculations. I was afraid an iPhone screen would be too small to work well for drawing complex molecules, but Wavefunction not only implemented their interface well on the iPhone, but it is in some ways easier to use! The standard iPhone move of pinching to shrink or expand a molecule, for instance, is much more intuitive than holding down the Command and Option keys as you mouse up or down. My standard extreme test for sketching a small molecule, dodecahedrane, is tricky, but doable.

    The tool pallet is a little cramped on the iPhone screen (at least on my 3GS), but works well. It helps to already be familiar with what Spartan can do, so you know what capabilities to look for.

    Keep in mind that the iSpartan App only has the ability to do Molecular Mechanics calculations (with the MMFF force field) itself, unless you also buy the iSpartan server to run on your Mac or PC. They do include the results of higher level calculations, however, for a large subset of their database of precalculated results, so you can visualize orbitals, surfaces, and spectra for many molecules you may be interested in without the server. They seem to have made a good compromise between the size of the database to include, and storage space on the iPhone: the App takes up 168 MB, which is sizable, but significantly smaller than the Audubon Guide to North American Trees, for instance.
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