Here is a screen capture of the latest version of Molecule Maker. Notice the scene tabs, which facilitate zooming in and out. I had to de-select scene transitions to make it work smoother (which, I admit, seems counterintuitive).

The lines sticking out of everything are ‘scaffolding,’ a little trick I learned in Sketchup to align groups and components together. The scaffolding lines are part of a component, and once no longer needed, can be universally deleted with a few clicks of thine mouse.

So how well does the new improved and expanded Molecule Maker work? Not as well as I’d hoped. I had hoped that it would be orders of magnitude faster than the simple version, but it’s only about twice as fast. And you know, I think a physical model set would be twice as fast yet.

I expect to add some methyl group examples, and I need balls for phosphorus, iron, etc. And I think the pentagon-hexagon ‘snowman’ and related templates need to be tilted sideways, to recognize that the work space is wider than high.

My ambition — I’m not sure I want to call it a goal yet — is to do a hundred molecules and upload them to Google 3D Warehouse. That could easily be done within a month, or if I dally, a year. Because my ADD is telling me it’s about time to be distracted.