Mercury for Mac

CNET Editors' review

by: Chris Page on April 23, 2013

Chemists or other professionals working with crystals may need a program to visualize them on the computer. For those users, Mercury for Mac works well, but offers little for average Mac users.

Mercury for Mac comes as a free version with some functions limited. The program states a full version license may be purchased, but its cost was unavailable. Installation completed quickly despite the file's large size of over 200MB. Upon startup, the program requires the user to accept a license agreement and indicate if a full version license has been purchased. There are no instructions or tutorials available with the program, which is a disappointment since the menus are incomprehensible for anyone who is not a computer-aided design professional. But since these are the target users, this may not be a real disadvantage. There are multiple options for selecting and displaying molecules, all of which would be useful for chemists. The program's basic functions operated well and had no bugs. Other options also allow the user to control the display characteristics of the model and perform analysis on them.

Mercury for Mac performs well and is suitable for chemists and other professionals who need to render crystal structures.