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 Vicente Soler on August 5, 2012 at 5:54pm

Here you go:
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/grasshopper-for-apple-mac-os

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on August 5, 2012 at 6:00pm

So does that mean no?

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on August 5, 2012 at 6:13pm

Curse David and his infernal riddles!

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on August 5, 2012 at 6:39pm

Permalink Reply by Maurício José Silva Matias on August 21, 2012 at 8:38pm

Hi David,

Can you send to my e-mail Grasshopper OSX Beta release,
a waiting to help the community to make a final version of this best plugin for parametric modeling.

Thank You!!

criativis@hotmail.com

criativis@criativis.com.br

Regards...

Permalink Reply by Jonah Hawk on August 21, 2012 at 9:07pm

Here is the information you need:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/grasshopper-for-apple-mac-os

cheers

;-P

Permalink Reply by Tree on November 5, 2014 at 9:13am

David,

Not to ask a difficult question but since 2010 has it become possible to compile grasshopper plugins via mono?

Permalink Reply by Arend on November 5, 2014 at 9:38am

It might be possible if you can compile it against Windows.Froms and System.Drawing. I couldn't guess why you would want to do this though?

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on November 5, 2014 at 9:45am

As far as I know this is the party line: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/grasshopper-for-apple-mac-os

David is writing Grasshopper 2.0 which as far as I know will be written with cross platform capability in mind. So much so that there might even be a Mac in the same room as his PC.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 5, 2014 at 10:37am

Grasshopper will load any proper .NET assembly, no matter what language or platform was used to compile it. A maximum of .NET 3.5 is allowed for Rhino5, and .NET 4.5 for Rhino6 I believe.

As for Mac development, McNeel is now working with Curtis Wensley, long time developer of the Eto UI platform. He's already been helping us out a lot over the past few months and starting December we can officially count him as one of our own. We've been (unsuccessfully) trying to fault Eto for a while now, so it's beginning to look like a seriously good basis for cross platform UI development. We're already putting cross platform UI in Rhino6 and Rhino5 for Mac and GH2 will in all likelihood be based on Eto instead of winforms, WPF, Cocoa, or indeed other cross platform solutions.

It is unlikely that GH1 will ever run on the Mac, what with it already being a winforms and System.Drawing assembly.

Some Eto details:

Eto is an open-source project and we're going to ship a slightly modified version of it with Rhino6 and Rhino for Mac.
.NET plugins relying only on RhinoCommon, Eto and core framework assemblies should run on both Operating Systems. And I mean the same binaries, you don't even have to compile different versions.
Eto is a wrapper around native UI frameworks. UI will look native wherever it runs, although you do have to make sure to swap OK and CANCEL buttons and use platform specific wording like "Apply" vs. "OK".
Eto will provide access to 2D graphics engines (GDI+ and Direct2D on Windows, CoreGraphics on the Mac). It is at present not clear whether we'll also provide access to 3D graphics.