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VIDA was originally developed to fill a very specific need - the ability to easily browse through a large number (>100,000) of small molecules. This was particularly important to OpenEye as many of our tools were capable of producing an enormous amount of data. At that time, there really was no acceptable solution to handle this amount of data in a user-friendly manner. Therefore, VIDA was created to solve this problem.
VIDA's intuitive and easy to use interface dramatically changed the way researchers were able to work and was widely adopted. Unfortunately, as the user-base continued to grow, so did VIDA. An enormous number of features were requested and in the end too many of them were implemented. Unfortunately, this significantly increased the bulk and decreased the stability of VIDA.
Another problem that became evident was VIDA's dependence on the OELib toolkit for chemistry handling. While OELib was an excellent toolkit for its time, it had an unfortunate ``feature" in that it tried to be smarter than you and would attempt to correct the chemistry of the input molecules. Unfortunately, this often resulted in mangled chemistries much to the dismay of the user.
Fortunately, while VIDA was being developed, OpenEye embarked on an extensive and successful development project to create a new more robust chemistry toolkit - OEChem. With the completion and wide adoption of OEChem throughout OpenEye and our customers, it became clear that the time was right for the development of a new version of VIDA based on OEChem.
The decision to port VIDA to use OEChem prompted a lengthy discussion about the current design of VIDA. Extensive thought went into what should and more importantly what should not be a part of VIDA 2.0. The design goals were to reproduce the excellent visualization and browsing functionality of the first version, while emphasizing stability and simplicity of interaction. We believe we achieved these goals with the release of VIDA 2.0.
After successful tackling stability, we decided to focus our efforts on improving the user experience by making a cleaner and more simplified user interface. This triggered a significant redesign of the user interface which we hope will make VIDA easier to use and more accessible to all users. Given this large change, plus a large number of additional new features, we are releasing this newest version as VIDA 3.0.
We look forward to your comments and feedback.
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