User Interface Overview

Welcome to the user manual for Catana application (Welcome Page | Application).
This section will provide you with an introduction to the user interface and its core parts.

Overview of Catana User Interface

Scene View

The most important part of the Catana's user interface is the scene view, visualizing the individual structures and related data. By default, the structures are visualized on a black background but the user is able to change the background color to his or her liking using the Scene option in the Navigation bar.

The navigation bar serves for multiple purposes, as it allows for

  • opening menus for importing and exporting of structures,
  • starting AlphaFold predictions,
  • running dynamic procedures,
  • modifying some properties of the scene,
  • executing plugins and scripts,
  • showing built-in help window,
  • and so on.

Layouts Menu

The purpose of layouts is to show or hide certain parts of the user interface to enable the user to focus on the task at hand. Currently, Catana offers four layouts:

  • Visualization: this layout hides the left and right bars to provide space for visual analysis of the visualized structures
  • Coarse-grained modeling: in this layout, Controls panel contains operations enabling to create and modify coarse-grained structures using common DNA nanostructures modeling features
  • All-atom modeling: in this layout, Controls panel provides features suitable for all-atom modeling
  • Command-line interface: this layouts shows a command-line interface enabling to control the Catana using one of the available scripting commands

Gizmos Panel

Panel providing tools related primarily to translation and rotation of structures – it enables to show or hide transformation gizmos and set their axes behavior. Finally, it also provides "center" button enabling to set the center of camera rotation.

Controls Panel

Controls panel provides tools allowing for creation, modification or removal of structures or their parts. Contents of this panel depend on the chosen Layout.

Workspace

Workspace view lists all components, i.e., structures loaded into the scene. Apart from component's name, Workspace also provides information about the component type and enables to execute quick actions.
Hovering over component in Workspace will higlight the given component in the Scene view, while double-click will bring this component to focus. Finally, details of this component will be shown in Inspector after clicking on it either in Workspace or directly in Scene view.

Inspector

Inspector view shows details of the selected component, enabling to execute various operations, change representations, view primary sequence, and so on.

User interface of the individual component

Bottom Bar

Bottom bar currently serves for three purposes:

  • It contains version and build time of the currently used instance of Catana application. This is important mainly for bug-reporting purposes.
  • Then, it shows controls for the currently selected tool.
  • Finally, bottom right corner provides buttons enabling to modify selected properties of the scene.