Hi Danny,

> When I posted this my only thought was; It'll be cool to have a Web collaboration
> viewer for MoI, since Sunglass was releasing the API.

Yeah it might work well as a 3D viewer for showing people your models. Although it's a bit of a tough call compared to say Acrobat since it doesn't work for anyone using IE, that's actually a pretty substantial stumbling block. You'd have to tell some roughly 30% of people who you want to share with that they have to install a different web browser in order to see it...


> Is this a possibility Michael? As you know, I know very little about coding.

Well sure, everything is a possibility! ;) But it usually takes a fair amount of effort to both study and test and gain familiarity with a new API so it's not too likely that I'd be able to gather enough time to focus on working on that anytime too soon...

I'd be kind of inclined to wait a bit and see if it's turning out to be useful for other programs for a while first.

I'm also not sure what is involved with the plug-ins anyway - if it's just a method to publish a file to their web server, that's something that you should be able to do with their web app directly anyway rather than actually needing a special in-program plug-in to do it. I would think that you should be able to use MoI with it already if it just takes common model data types.

This kind of falls into some of the same area as special purpose rendering file format support - I'm not really that keen on implementing a ton of app-specific file formats all of which contain the same kind of data in them for sending data to renderers, I try to focus more on supporting some key common formats and then it's up to a bunch of different renderers to support those same common formats well. That's just fundamentally more efficient for me than trying to make 30 or 40 different kinds of individual app-specific file formats exporters from MoI. This seems to be in the same general category - if it's just a file viewer, I'd think that you should be able to just upload some regular CAD files with it without any special formats required. If that's not the case then it's something that Sunglass should implement themselves then they'll get a wide amount of support automatically rather than requiring a specialized plug-in for every different system to be implemented first.

This is all kind of speculation from me though since they don't seem to have much of any public accessible information on their web site so I'm not really 100% sure what their stuff actually does.

But for example you can put stuff you made with MoI up on GrabCAD and I didn't have to do any special plug-in for that, you just upload your regular model files and then they are up there, right? I'm not sure exactly what would be gained by making special plugins.

- Michael