Hi FDP, don't get me wrong, I definitely do want to get some things that you mentioned to work in MoI relatively soon like hierarchical groups and instancing. But other things you were asking about are either further away than v4 or maybe never... I didn't mean to be negative or sound irritated in my explanations I just don't want to "sugarcoat" those types of things that are not likely to happen soon (or at all) so that you can plan accordingly. If features in Solidworks would help you get your job done with less work right now then using Solidworks would probably be a good idea for you. That doesn't mean that you can't still use MoI in areas where it does a good job, especially in early stages for concept modeling and quick drawing.


> The real disadvantage of MoI comes when you want to modify a complex design
> down the road, and this is where I think a changes like allowing some kind of
> operations history/editor along with hierarchy would be tremendously useful!

Yup, that's definitely correct - if you're at the stage where you're setting up mechanical part production and you know you will adjusting diameters and producing families of parts that's a stage where you would probably be better off with parametric functions in Solidworks. I certainly agree that this would be useful to have in MoI as well and it is something that I do hope to add into MoI. But there will be a lot of work involved in bringing that to MoI and I thought you were asking specifically if it would be in MoI v4, not just if it would ever be in MoI in the future.


> Organizational features that are broad enough could allow for most of the things I am talking
> about, and more <...>

So the unfortunate thing about this part is that making very broad functions can also take a lot more design and implementation work on my side. The "drop an image object under another object" is a good example of that - currently background images are a separate type of entity in MoI than a geometry object and trying to make them behave the same as geometry in grouping and hierarchy doesn't just come along automatically, it would probably involve some amount of internal redesign for that to happen.

The main focus of images in MoI is to make it possible to bring in a background image to use as a tracing reference, so the current implementation is tuned for that use, not for using it as a descriptive annotation like it sounds like you're looking for?


> The same goes for instancing, and allowing outside links. Here, for example, you could allow
> a user to modify a linked image, in say Photoshop, and have the changes permute directly
> back into MoI without having to reload and re-orient the image reference.

So again unfortunately there would be a substantial amount of work involved on my end to implement all the details that would actually enable that to happen. I have to weigh that work against the benefit that would be gained. Like I mentioned above the main use case for images in MoI is that they're intended to be used as a reference image like a scanned blueprint for example. If you have such an image that you are using as a background image in MoI there isn't much use in editing it in Photoshop dynamically.

If you have a very different use case like if you wanted the image to be part of some extensive 2D printed document that you wanted to create entirely inside of MoI like a Desktop Publishing app, then that type of live linking would be useful. But it would take a whole lot more work to set up "Desktop Publishing" level image infrastructure in MoI than it did to set up "image backdrop for tracing" infrastructure.

You've got to remember that I'm just one person working on MoI, so my resources are very limited. The more narrowly scoped and specifically targeted something is, usually goes along with a less intensive implementation as well. If I were to target all features in MoI to be flexible enough to be used for areas other than as modeling aids, each of those things would take a lot more of my time to work on and then since my time is limited the cost is that other features wouldn't happen.



> I hope you don't take my suggestions as presumptuous or critical.

I certainly took no offense and I did not intend to reply negatively, I'm sorry if it came across that way. I'm just trying to explain how MoI at its essence a pretty focused tool and if you are doing work outside of that focus area then some other broader tool like Solidworks is likely to be a better fit for those areas of your work.

I do expect to add more functionality to MoI over time, including in several areas that you're asking about. But some things that you listed like for example having a web link attached to something in your drawing, would be something for generating production type 2D drawings, it's just not an area that MoI is focused on right now. Some basic annotations like simple dimensions are pretty high on my target list but I only expect to have those at a simple level especially at first.

- Michael