Grasshopper for Mac update (don't get too excited)

Hello everybody,

I figured I'd let you know about the latest developments regarding Grasshopper (and other .NET plugins) for Rhino Mac.

Last week some of us from McNeel spoke with Miguel de Icaza (head of development of the Mono project) about running plugins that use Windows.Forms on Mono-Mac. The news is basically not good. Though it isn't terribly bad either.

The WinForms part of Mono is build upon the old Mac Carbon scheme. Rhino for Mac is build upon the new Mac Cocoa scheme. These two don't play well together. This means we cannot run Grasshopper without modifications on the Mac.

Miguel advised us to write a wrapper dll for UI elements that is hooked up to WinForms on windows and Cocoa on Mac, and this will allow Plugin developers to write plugins with a GUI that will run on both Operating systems. Development of these libraries will take months even with an experienced developer. And then I need to rewrite all the UI in Grasshopper. As you can probably imagine, this is not exactly trivial.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Seattle, WA

Replies are closed for this discussion.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Lucas Issey Yoshinaga on October 30, 2010 at 12:30pm

i don't care if it's just an idea, it's great news anyway!!!
thanks!!!

Permalink Reply by Robert Thompson on October 30, 2010 at 12:38pm

@david you made me fall off my chair man
:)

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on October 30, 2010 at 12:52pm

I fail to see how this is great news. But then again, I don't own a Mac and have just learned that time that would've been spent developing new features for Rhino and Grasshopper will be spent rewriting code, but oh well.

On a positive side, hopefully there is a big market in Mac, you sell a lot, economies of scale, drive prices down, quality up, etc.

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on October 30, 2010 at 1:44pm

Yes, David pretty clearly lays it out there...I even have a mac and its concerning that development resources will be spent redoing parts of the code as you mention...

Permalink Reply by Stefan Boeykens on October 30, 2010 at 2:16pm

Well, I hope that with the recent attention people have for Macs and iOS, this doesn't burry the plans for a Mac-version of Grasshopper too soon. Once more a proof (at least to me) that relying on platform-specific techniques (.NET, cocoa, MFC) can be quite bothersome the day you look at trying to get to another platform. FWIW, it didn't stop Autodesk from porting AutoCAD to the Mac and I like what they did with it. And I do like what McNeel is doing with Rhino on the Mac too.

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on October 30, 2010 at 4:18pm

You could argue that without "platform-specific techniques" Grasshopper would've never seen the light of day. AFAIK, David is not a professional programmer so he probably wouldn't have dabbled into creating C++ plugins for Rhino while studying architecture (or urbanism?).

Permalink Reply by gustavo fontana on November 25, 2010 at 9:06am

If your statement is true, i wished our industry started paying more attention to the 'amateur' work of people like David.

... Because most of the great programmers all come from traditional cookie-cutter code school, right? ;)

Permalink Reply by Emilio Morello on October 30, 2010 at 3:53pm

I agree with Stefan.
Using non cross-platform libraries, soon or later gives you troubles.
Just my humble opinion.
But I can see good news here.
It means that when/if Rhino will be ported to Linux, or whatever will exist
at that far far time in the future, some work will already be done. ;)

Emilio

Permalink Reply by Igo Kommers Wender on October 30, 2010 at 4:01pm

I wonder if people in the Mono Project has any plan to migrate Mono from the old Mac Carbon scheme to the new Mac Cocoa scheme in the near future. If I'm not wrong, this would make things a lot easier to port GH for the Mac platform.
Great news anyway!!!
Thank you David for letting us know about this

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 30, 2010 at 4:45pm

They don't. Miguel said as much. They're also not going to invest in WPF.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Seattle, WA

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on October 31, 2010 at 10:07am

I'm trying to find something positive in this post, but I just can't seem to. Right now I'm a little more annoyed at the people from the Mono project as their seaming lack of desire to respond to this issue (which I doubt is unique) seams somewhat against the nature of what their project. I also don't like that they apparently aren't interested in WPF either. It looks like this is going to take McNeel resources to iron out, which is probably the worst news of all of this.

Permalink Reply by Steve Baer on November 1, 2010 at 8:45pm

I didn't come away from the meeting with any sort of disappointed feeling at all. From my tests so far, everything except the classes in System.Windows.Forms works on OSX (we've had IronPython running on top of mono on OSX for a while and it seems to perform really well.) Heck, I'm amazed at the amount of work already done by the mono team to get where we are.

The mono team has recently put out a MonoMac assembly which is most of the bindings between .NET and the cocoa user interface classes on OSX. I understand what we would need to do to write a common UI assembly which uses either WinForms on Windows or MonoMac on OSX. It is a pretty significant project, but not impossible by any means.

I wouldn't say that the team has a lack of interest in any of the frameworks. They did implement a small subset of WPF in order to get the mono version of silverlight running. The problem is just the sheer size of that framework compared to all of the other projects out there. They are also busy writing support frameworks for the iphone and android which are pretty hot topics right now.

-Steve