iBabel version 5

The latest version of iBabel is now available. The big change is iBabel is now a universal application.

This was built and tested on an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro M1 Max, and then tested on an Intel MacPro and Intel iMac Pro. iBabel can be dowloaded here http://macinchem.org/ibabel/version5/iBabel.zip.

iBabel is a GUI for Openbabel and requires the prior installation of Openbabel

conda install -c conda-forge openbabel

Openbabel can also be installed using Home-brew

brew install open-babel

You do need to known where the executable has been installed. In the terminal type the command below to get the path to obabel

which obabel
/Users/chrisswain/miniconda3/bin/obabel

Then open the iBabel preferences, available from the iBabel top menu bar or by the keyboard shortcut ⌘, and add the location to obabel

You are then good to go.

Much of the functionality is unchanged, there are a couple of minor bug fixes but the description of the previous version should be fine https://www.macinchem.org/ibabel/version4/iBabel4_0.php.

One new thing is the inclusion of a couple of Unix commands that help when dealing with large files. You can view the first few lines of a file to check headers, delimiters etc. Count the number of entries, list the fields in sdf files and split ultra large SMILES files into more manageable chunks.

Last updated 12 May 2022