Hi Michael.

> Maybe I should not have written all of this since
> you will probably perceive it as an attack on you.
> Instead please think of it as more of a disagreement with your conclusions.

I see nothing in your post that i would consider a personal attack. In fact i find it amazing that you took all this time to answer my post, point by point, even though i'm not even a customer of yours. I really wish more developers where that involved in the discussions about their applications and the community in general.

> There were times when I wondered if it was really
> worthwhile to even attempt an OSX version because there
> is a kind of undercurrent of intolerance for things that
> deviate from the "one true way of Cocoa"...

Reading my post for a second time, i can see how a few of my remarks could make me look as an apple style guide fanatic or a true believer in the "one true way of Cocoa".
Far from it. I have been using professional 3D software, for more than 25 years. I am fully aware of the complexities of their UI design and how thinks can get messy really quick. Not one of the applications that i like uses the standard interface of the underlying OS. It might even be impossible, as 3D modeling is a very complex process and its demands are far greater than the problems the standard style guides where design to solve. The same goes for graphics applications like photoshop, CAD systems, video editors etc.
When i said the UI of Moi3D is genius i failed to mention is that i was also referring to the architecture. Using Webkit and javascript is what makes it customizable, extensible and generally amazing. It will definitely save me hours of tedious modeling! And i would never expect it to look like cocoa or behave like it. I am happy with the way it is.

> Is what you experience so totally different from what I've seen over here?

I've used Moi3D for a couple of days, and i have no major complains about its performance. Yes there is a bit of an issue with resizing the window but i can live with that. The same about the rather long launching time. I also retract my comment about "almost native speed". It IS native code execution as you correctly say.


> > Moi3D is really fast now, but i can't imagine how much smoother
> > it would have been if you could use OSX directly.

> Maybe something on the order of 1 millisecond smoother
> (again, with the exception of window resizing) - most
> likely nothing that you would be able to notice
> or really be able to measure.

I still have my reservations about the UI speed. I run a simple javascript DOM Core Performance benchmark in both safari and Moi3D (http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/perf/dom/artificial/core/001.html) in order to judge to performance of Webkit in both environments.
On my macbook pro the results are:

Safari:
Total elapsed time: 56ms
Breakdown (fraction shows time relative to append time):
Append: 1.00; 13ms
Prepend: 0.92; 12ms
Index: 0.54; 7ms
Insert: 1.23; 16ms
Remove: 0.62; 8ms

Moi3D:
Total elapsed time: 336ms
Breakdown (fraction shows time relative to append time):
Append: 1.00; 74ms
Prepend: 1.07; 79ms
Index: 0.47; 35ms
Insert: 1.19; 88ms
Remove: 0.81; 60ms

Still thats just a benchmark which is largely irrelevant in this case as i agreed with you that the UI is more than fast enough as it is, and the viewports run at native speed.

To conclude, I am in no way diapointed with the mac port. I absolutly love it. I am really glad you did it as i would be able to use Moi3D instead of rhino for most of my modeling.
I claim to know nothing about the internal architecture of Moi3D, other than what i can judge by looking at the application folder. So, i'm sure that doing a fully native port is a huge undertaking as you say. As a Mac user i am really grateful for the current OSX port of Moi3D and i would definitely buy it as soon as i have the first project that would justify the investment.

My post was mainly about what i thought was a missed opportunity. "There you have an excellent program, that uses Webkit for the UI, OpenGL for the viewports and even the html is very OSX like. And its going through all these layers!"
After your reply i understand the oversimplification of this and the amount of work it would require. And maybe my post was based on my personal experience of having to emulate one type of UI using another and the complexity that arises in the long run due to the amound of overwriting it requires.

Hi Dinos,
Do you have the opportunity to run that benchmark with MoI with some other MAC 3d CAD program?? I would like to see that. It may be a better benchmark than with a simple browser.

As far as i know no other 3D CAD software uses Webkit for the ui..

A little question, I've tried to modify the moi.ini file for adding my shortcuts but it just added a couple of them and when I opened the ini file again, it showed a lot of letters instead of my shortcuts. Im using osx lion. Ive tried to locate the ini file and replace it with other but i can't find it manually. Where is it?

Hi ed, which shortcut key were you trying to add which didn't work? It sounds like there is some bug there that needs fixing up.

I just tried for example adding in Cmd+J for Join and it seemed to be working ok, so maybe it has to do with some particular specific keys that you were using, so I'll need to know what those are in order to fix it.

> Ive tried to locate the ini file and replace it with other but
> i can't find it manually. Where is it?

You can find the moi.ini file by going to Options > General and push the "Edit .ini file" button - that will pop up a little dialog that shows the location of the .ini file on it.

As of the most recent beta it will go under
/Users/ [your user name] /Library/Application Support/Moi/moi.ini

- Michael

Hi steve,

> Had the same thing happen again yesterday, was working on
> the attached file, last night, after about 1 1/2 hours working
> with the same file, <...>

Hmm, yeah so loading the file now I can't seem to repeat any problem with it anymore, over here it seems to boolean union into a solid fine now.

In the screenshot you show with the sort of weird wrinkle or hole near the end of a tube - that's the kind of thing that a damaged trimming boundary looks like so at some point during your work something went wrong with one operation and produced an improper trimming boundary there.

So there's definitely a bug in something, but it's really hard for me to figure out where it might have been when I can't repeat the problem in a systematic way over here, it could have been in some previous command that you used before the boolean itself.

If you find some way that you can repeat the problem in a definite series of steps then please let me know about that because being able to repeat the problem goes a long way in helping for debugging it.

- Michael

You are right Michael, it has to be an specific shortcut. The way i did it the first time was just pasting the shortcuts of my old ini file on windows, that way it doesn't work, but it worked when I just added one like L=Line. Here is the list of shortcuts I entered the first time:

B=Booleanunion
C=Copy
Ctrl+A=script:moi.geometryDatabase.selectAll();
Ctrl+C=CopyClipboard
Ctrl+E=Export
Ctrl+I=Import
Ctrl+N=New
Ctrl+O=Open
Ctrl+S=Save
Ctrl+Shift+C=CopyClipboardWithOrigin
Ctrl+Shift+V=PastePart
Ctrl+V=Paste
Ctrl+X=Cut
Ctrl+Y=script:moi.command.redo();
Ctrl+Z=script:moi.command.undo();
D=Curve
Delete=Delete
DownArrow=script:moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode = 'Front';
E=Rotate
F=Line
F1=script:moi.drawingAids.gridSnap = !moi.drawingAids.gridSnap;
F2=script:moi.drawingAids.straightSnap = !moi.drawingAids.straightSnap;
F3=script:moi.drawingAids.objectSnap = !moi.drawingAids.objectSnap;
G=Booleandifference
H=script:moi.geometryDatabase.hide();
I=script:moi.ui.createDialog( 'moi://ui/PluginGallery3.htm', 'resizeable,defaultWidth:1000,defaultHeight:600' );
J=Join
K=Separate
L=script:moi.geometryDatabase.lock();
LeftArrow=moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode = '3D';
M=Explodemove
N=Assignname
O=script:moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.reverseView( moi.ui.getActiveViewport().name );
P=Point
Q=Offset
R=Scale
RightArrow=script:moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode = 'Right';
S=Scale1D
Space=Showpoints
T=Trim
U=script:if ( moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode != 'split' ) { moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode = 'split' } else { var viewport = moi.ui.getViewportUnderMouse(); if ( viewport ) viewport.viewpanel.mode = viewport.name; }
UpArrow=script:moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode = 'Top';
V=Mirror
W=Move
X=Extrude
Y=script:moi.command.redo();
Z=script:moi.command.undo();

Hi ed,

> The way i did it the first time was just pasting the shortcuts
> on my old ini file on windows, that way it doesn't work, but
> it worked when I just added one like L=Line. Here is the list
> of shortcuts I entered the first time:

So when you say "pasting the shortcuts" do you mean pasting them directly into the moi.ini file using some text editor application? If so which text editor are you using?

Or do you mean pasting them in one at a time using the Shortcut Keys UI in the Options dialog?

Because I'd like to try and repeat the problem over here.

If you're using a text editor program to edit the moi.ini file directly, make sure you save it as "plain text", and not as something like .rtf format which won't work properly.

- Michael

Well I opened the windows-moi-ini on notepad and then from mac-moi the ini launched on textedit.

I tried again and from what i saw i think what you said is right, the two text editors are using different formats of text, or maybe copying text from windows notepad on parallels to text edit is the problem.

That was the problem! I opened both .ini on text edit and everything passed right from one file to another!

Hi dinos,

> In fact i find it amazing that you took all this time to answer
> my post, point by point, even though i'm not even a customer
> of yours.

Well, I kind of have to because it could otherwise cause FUD about performance when that seems to be an area that is actually handled particularly well by this porting method...


> Yes there is a bit of an issue with resizing the window but i can
> live with that.

I do expect to work on improving this.


> The same about the rather long launching time.

That's actually caused by this anti-cracking obfuscation and encryption mechanism called Themida/WinLicense which moi_lib.dll is processed with. That's only on totally public releases that I ship out, it's not on the actual full version releases that use a license key. So on the full version this particular slow startup issue will not be present.


> Still thats just a benchmark which is largely irrelevant
> in this case as i agreed with you that the UI is more than
> fast enough as it is, and the viewports run at native speed.

I don't really know exactly what is going on with that particular HTML benchmark (for others wondering what this is about, it's about the performance of the HTML used for the GUI elements like the buttons and menus and such, not the 3D display area and not geometry processing) - it could just be a difference that the WebKit that MoI uses is about a year old and maybe they've made some tune ups to DOM handling since then.

I'm not at all concerned about it, since that benchmark measures a particular area of large quantities of DOM manipulation which does not crop up inside of MoI. So since that area is not currently a bottleneck, an improvement in it would not have any noticeable practical effect, other than just making the numbers of that benchmark look pretty.

Again, the key thing if you want to judge UI speed is to simply use the UI in the application itself, why worry about what is even labeled in the URL as an "artifical" benchmark ?

If the UI is already behaving in a fully responsive and seemingly instantaneous manner, then you are not going to see any noticeable improvement in things that only end up saving a millisecond or two here and there in the way that things are actually used.

And if the UI is performing smoothly in regular operation, it just does not make sense to worry about a theory that you think it ought to perform poorly - I mean you have direct "real world, not artificial benchmark" evidence to the contrary.

Are you trying to do some kind of unusual thing with some custom UI where large scale DOM manipulation performance is a particular issue for you?


> "There you have an excellent program, that uses Webkit for
> the UI, OpenGL for the viewports and even the html is very
> OSX like. And its going through all these layers!"

Yeah but it also uses stuff like COM for the object model and interprocess communication, and all sorts of various Windows API calls for things like multi threading, synchronization, top level window management, timers, etc...

So there's just a wide variety of all kinds of stuff that would need rewriting in order to do the kind of approach that you were describing. It adds up to a whole lot of work and it's pretty hard to even judge the volume involved, which tends to be a sign that it would drag on and on for a really long time. It could even be such a long time involved that it could be in the areas of an endless huge time sink that would never actually be completed. Things of that nature can actually be a project ending type strategy because of all the potential negative side effects like burnout and stagnation.

Meanwhile Wine has implemented all that various Win API stuff already using a unix back end, with generally excellent performance...

This information should shed more light about the reasoning behind this particular approach. ;)

I was not really sure at the start that this method was actually going to work, but I thought that it was worth a try since the potential payoff was significant and I don't think other approaches would have been feasible. I'm pretty sure at this point that it's going to work though, at least for the vast majority of users who care more about how it actually runs rather than if it's "100% pure Cocoa" ...


I do actually have some native cocoa elements for particular targeted areas like the file dialogs.


The other really good thing about this current approach is that it gives parity between the Windows and OSX version. I generally expect for the OSX version to have the entire same feature set as the Windows version and after just a little bit more refinement and tweaking I expect for new features that are implemented to come in directly on the OSX version with no extra effort needed on my part, unless there is some kind of external library dependency involved.

That parity is quite frequently not the case when there is a stronger bifurcation between the different versions of the software. When there's more effort and too much different behavior involved for one of the versions it is easy for one of them to lag behind the "main version", sometimes quite substantially.

So a "full low level port" type approach can easily have its own set of drawbacks too.

- Michael

I'll try and repeat the problem, so far , all I can say is it starts to happen when I've been using MOI for over 1hr, when I work, I do a lot of Undo's and I'll take an object I'm working on make a few copies and try different things on, so my files can grow quite large to I delete all temp objects.

I'm also have MoI set to mm, and tend to work on objects under 200mm

Some of the other things that start to happen, I might try to union 2 solids and , in stead of 1 single solid, it ends up removing 1 solid.

But I can't 100% rule out user error, has I'm been using MoI less then a month with no back ground in modelling software :)

Hi Steve,

> I'll try and repeat the problem, so far , all I can say is it
> starts to happen when I've been using MOI for over 1hr,
> when I work, I do a lot of Undo's and I'll take an object
> I'm working on make a few copies and try different things
> on, so my files can grow quite large to I delete all temp
> objects.

So unfortunately these are not really well defined concrete steps that I can repeat myself over here - over here I also use MoI for over 1 hour at a time and don't run into that. So I don't know if it's possibly related to some kind of difficult geometry situation (like booleaning objects that are barely grazing each other at a shared edge or doing booleans between surfaces that have self-intersections like they fold back over top of themselves or things like that) which I tend to avoid but which you're doing somewhat frequently or something like that.

I appreciate the bug report, but right now there isn't much for me to go on to attempt to do anything about it. In order to fix a bug I need to narrow down where in the program code it's actually happening and it really helps for me to be able to repeat the problem over here so I can examine what is actually going on in the debugger.

If you run into it again, I guess try to save the file off so that I can take a look at it and see if I can repeat the problem with it, or maybe offer some suggestions about some particular type of situation that can cause model integrity problems and should be avoided.

Thanks,
- Michael

Hi Steve,

> Some of the other things that start to happen, I might try
> to union 2 solids and , in stead of 1 single solid, it ends
> up removing 1 solid.

Just in general that kind of thing can happen if one of the objects is not actually a solid anymore and has ended up with an opening in it, or if the solid has become ill formed and does not have a uniform inside and outside region to it anymore - that can happen if pieces of your solid are made up of surfaces that intersect themselves, like they bunch up in some awkward way and push through some other portion of themselves. Or the equivalent thing can happen if the trimming boundary of a surface intersects itself, that kind of messed up trimming boundary will usually have some weird shaded display in that area as well.

So anyway I don't know if that helps but that's the type of stuff to look for when you run into that.

You can tell if your object has become an open surface by looking at the type indicator in the upper-right corner of the screen, if it says "Joined srf" or "surface" instead of solid then it means it has an opening in it somewhere.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

Thanks for taking all this time to explain the technical reasons for your choices on the mac port.
Given all the reasons you mention in your post, it is quite clear to me that this is the right choice and the main reason that i can have Moi3D running on my mac :-)

It is very usable and fast as it is, and i will definitely purchase a license as soon as i can justify the investment.

Is there possible to open two MoI windows at once?

Yes, in the menu bar choose MoI > New Window.
Note that it takes several seconds to open the second window.

Didn't noticed, thanks!

I don't know if someone had this problem before but I can't open a file from the MoI window, I have to double clic the file from the finder.