>Be sure to post the viewer here for us to get a look at.

I'll try to remember to post here too once things are rolling well. I've been talking about it on the Rhino forums. Actually, I must admit, I've tried MoI but only briefly. I'm really a rhino user. But MoI has some draw for me. I like it's GUI, I like the better meshing (better by FAR!), I keep hearing great things about it. So I'm certainly interested in MoI and I try to keep up on it from time to time.

So, my viewer was geared to allow some of us on the Rhino NG to be able to view 3dm models in linux (or OSX or windows) without a copy of rhino. Since MoI uses 3dm it will work to view MoI models too. It's certainly not meant to ever become anything even close to a replacement for MoI or Rhino but some people (namely clients) need only view models not generate them. For such people a standalone viewer would be ideal. This viewer will be open source once I get it to a point that I feel is suitable for general public use/hacking. This should be soon. I've been trying it on 32bit Vista and 64bit Debian linux so I can at least vouch for cross platform support between linux and windows. OSX should be possible but I am far from a fan of macs so I go nowhere near XCode or macs in general.

At any rate I hope to have a sourceforge project going by the end of the week. If I forget to link to it here then slap me.

>It can do kind of vaguely similar things but not up to the full level of what I need.
>It is the combination of markup + layout + script logic that makes for the best flexibility.
>Here's a quick example of the kind of flexibility that I need to help me work with UI in the most effective way:
><SNIP>

Thanks for that detailed explanation. As I said in my above post I'm more interested in MoI than experienced so I hadn't really done enough with the GUI to know much about it other than screenshots and some very limited use. From screenshots and my dim recollection the GUI looked reasonable enough to replicate in QT. From your description I see that things are not as simple as I had believed. I think that a lot of what is going on in MoI's GUI *could* be done in QT but at a greater (and maybe much greater) development cost.

QT now (I think it's new in 4.3 or 4.5) supports a forms based layout that might be closer to what you need it to do but I have zero experience with it yet so I might just be making things up.

Thanks again for the explanation. If I ever do happen upon a solution that looks like maybe it's what you are looking for I'll shoot you a message. Otherwise, best of luck in your investigation of cross platform ways to get your HTML based GUI to happen!

And, for what it's worth, I think MoI looks pretty sweet! Keep up that good work.

Hi AdderD,

re: Viewer - yeah that is something that a variety of MoI users could be interested in as well, so it would be cool if you could mention your progress on this forum as well if you remember! :)


> I think that a lot of what is going on in MoI's GUI *could*
> be done in QT but at a greater (and maybe much greater)
> development cost.

Certainly it is possible, but my best guess would be that it leans quite a bit towards the "much greater" side...

Also, maybe you're not aware of this but I'm the only developer working on MoI, so it is important for me to try and leverage already existing stuff when it is possible to do so.

Otherwise I would end up spending all my time working on the engine stuff and not on actually designing the UI. Leveraging an HTML engine gives me a significant amount of text and layout handling power along with it, which meets my particular needs better.


> QT now (I think it's new in 4.3 or 4.5) supports a forms
> based layout that might be closer to what you need it to do

I've taken a very brief look at that (that's the Qt Designer stuff you are referring to?), but it seems to be oriented more towards making kind of traditional dialog box windows as far as I can tell.

And don't get me wrong, it certainly looks like there is a lot of functionality and useful stuff in Qt as well, for a lot of projects I'm sure that it would be a great choice just using its normal stuff. I happen to have a pretty different UI than what is typically done though so it tends to be harder for me to benefit from a prepackaged toolkit to the same degree.


> And, for what it's worth, I think MoI looks pretty sweet!
> Keep up that good work.

Thanks!

- Michael

perhaps It will also be interesting to looks @ what methods, tools Autodesk StudioTools and Siemens NX have been using to bring their product to OS X...(just a thought)

NX 6 UI Rocks, thanks god they did not go for a another stupid Ribbon UI