AFR: Bob, SIGGRAPH is the big event for the 3D community, what will your company be showing this week?
(Bob McNeel): Not much that isn’t already available in Rhino Labs. We have a few things we might be showing that aren’t stable enough to post on Labs.
Will you be showing Rhino for Mac OS X?
Yes, Rhino OS X, and hopefully with new advanced rendering, Flamingo 2.0, new Rhino 5 features, Grasshopper, Brazil and a few other things.
What is the status of Mac version of Rhino?
Everything is moving along as expected. We are still getting the core moved over and we are trying to make sure enough of the core is working so that users can get work done — otherwise it won’t get field tested. We don’t want to get distracted right now by the Mac OS X user interface issues. We can deal with that later.
When will you have time to address the Mac user interface?
Hopefully we can start on the UI overhaul in a few months.
AFR: I know the Rhino for OS X beta project has gone better than expected for your company. Clearly there was a big interest in Rhino on OS X. Can you tell me how many beta testers you have thus far?
(Bob McNeel): We have nearly 12,000 beta users so far…and the list is still growing at a good rate.
Are there any key customers of Rhino that are beta testing the Mac version? Do they specifically want to switch to the Mac version once it is done?
About 60% of the beta users are current Rhino users on Windows. I expect most will want to switch. I don’t think we’ll attract many non-Rhino users until we have a real Mac OS X interface.
AFR: How robust will Rhino for the Mac be in terms of third-party support once you get parity between the platforms?
(Bob McNeel): All of our third-party developer support tools are based on what comes with the operating system. We haven’t focused on this issue yet, so I really don’t know how OS X compares to Windows. I do know the development tools are very different but I don’t know if one platform will be more robust than the other. I expect they will be about the same level but very different.
Let’s talk about the new Grasshopper a bit. Has there been any demand for a Mac version of Grasshopper?
Sure, but keep in mind that Grasshopper is just a user-interface on top of a bunch of Windows code. Something like this is possible for OS X, but it will require finding an OS X user interface designer guru that can write code.
Are you saying Grasshopper is just Windows code on top of a C-language code core and that all you need is just a good OS X GUI designer to build the front end to the core of Grasshopper? Is that what you are saying?
Not exactly. Grasshopper is built on Microsoft’s .NET using the Windows GUI, et cetera that .NET provides. It is just UI (user interface) calls into the .NET libraries. Yes…it is possible to use one of the .NET clones but we would need a Windows programmer that knows both .NET and OS X UI. I think it would be easier for an OS X programmer to just start over. Assuming that OS X has a rich set of development tools like .NET.
Okay I understand now. That makes it much clearer. What needs to happen is you need an OS X programmer who knows if Apple’s Xcode and Cocoa development environment has equivalent functions to call into from an OS X (front end) user interface.
It is hard to explain to people how little code is needed with .NET. I expect if Grasshopper was written in C or C++ calling standard Windows GUI calls it would have taken at least 10 times longer to write.
What initiated the Grasshopper project? Where it is going?
Like everything we do it came from the users. Mostly out of frustration designers had learning scripting to do algorithmic architectural design.
Algorithmic design in architecture is becoming more important, but in general architects are modest mathematicians.
(Bob McNeel): It started as a prototype. We had just been watching and following what some of the users were doing and what they needed and were asking for. There is no grand plan beyond that. So far it has been working well…we did run into some core design problems that needed to be corrected before we could accommodate some of the requests from our users. That does slow things down from time to time, but it is not unexpected.
So at Robert McNeel & Associates you primarily develop software based on what your current users are asking for? You don’t look at the market and your competitors and make sure you are ahead of this or that trend?
I know maybe we should have some kind of plan but it really seems like the more planning we do the more often our users explain to us how foolish we are. It just turns out to be easier to try something and watch and listen. I guess we are really more anthropologists…than software designers or engineers.
AFR: I want to go back to Rhino for a second. Is the advanced renderer in the OS X version of Rhino — the one you spoke of earlier — is that based on Flamingo 2?
No. It is using our Toucan engine which is the base renderer in Rhino. It is a very advanced renderer — we just didn’t have enough time to expose all of the user interface in version 4. More will be working in version 5 on Rhino OS X.