jbshorty: the problem about installing/using bootcamp on Mac or any virtualization solution like VMware or Parallels, is that you must install windows and own a windows licence to do that. Then, it's no more the same price at the end for the customer (MoI+Windows). And if I'm not wrong, the low end version of Vista are not compatible (from a license point of view) with the virtualization.

About the Mac release itself, a native release is always better, especially on graphic software like MoI. I also understand the Michael point of view. The development of Amapi on Mac was always a problem and was big "time eater" (Yes, I was from the Amapi Dev team). Even if the mac userbase is growing very fast, Michael will have more customers on PC and since he is alone, it's better for him to focus on one development.

I am confirming that MOI runs on Parallels for Mac build 5570 (in Leopard). Others may have already confirmed this, but I couldn't find any. So the Direct3D thing on a virtualized Mac is a non-issue as far as I can tell. It still isn't as good as a native app, but it does mean that those people who run a virtualized Window to run things like Rhino anyway (like me) will be able to rock MOI. Sweet.

FYI re: Windows licensing costs: our students get Windows for $30, which we require that they install on their mandatory Macbook Pro laptops. We haven't, yet, required Parallels, but that may be coming at some point.

_P

I stumble across that @ Rhino OSX Forum and it makes me wonder, would that be the case this MOI as well?


>eric_m
Seems like it could almost just be an easy port over from windows.



The time, effort and expertise required to produce a version of Rhino for the Mac may only be fully understood by a software programmer.

One of the biggest problems is that not everything in Windows has a OSX counterpart. Yes, the Rhino core complies pretty well under OSX, but anything GUI/interface (like toolbars, menus, mouse actions, dialogs ...) all have to be rewritten for the Mac OS.

In addition, RhinoScript for the PC uses Microsoft's Active Scripting technology. Because Microsoft does not provide Active Scripting for the Mac, RhinoScript is not available on the Mac platform. For Plug-ins to work on the Mac, they will require that their 3rd party libraries have Mac binaries available. If the providers for these libraries do not compile their code for the Mac, the plug-in will not be available on the Mac.

Here is a little fun trivia. Rhino was first born an AutoCAD plugin called AccuModel back about 1994. Because we did not have control over the ever changing AutoCAD video interface, Rhino development was moved to a stand alone Windows product. For the first five versions of Rhino, all we had on staff were Windows programmers. Then Marlin volunteered to help us out and the Mac alpha came on line. Rhino/Mac history is now in the making.

Hope this helps.
Mary Fugier
Robert McNeel Technical Support

Is MOI using the some Scripting technology as Rhino and if not which one? Is it available on the Mac platform?

Thanks in advance and sorry for all the questions, is just I am trying to understand (my name is dummy).

Hi yannada, MoI is also currently using Microsoft's Active Scripting mechanism to run its scripts.

Microsoft's Active Scripting system kind of provides an overall harness and the actual scripts are run by different scripting engines which can implement different scripting languages.

At some point in Rhino's development (I guess starting with v3?) they decided to only support the VBScript engine for Rhino scripts. One problem with this is that VBScript is a proprietary Microsoft language, as far as I know there are no portable implementations of a VBScript interpreter that can run that script code in a non-Microsoft environment. So that decision kind of caused an extra roadblock for porting Rhino.

For MoI, I have written all the scripts using the JavaScript language instead. JavaScript is an open standard language, and there are various different interpreters available that can run .js code on different operating systems.

So for MoI scripting language support itself is not such a big porting issue.

However, that does not mean that it will be easy to port MoI - it only means that there probably isn't an issue with this one specific thing.

There are still plenty of other issues that make it difficult to port MoI anytime soon aside from this.

- Michael

and it's not so difficult to found anywhere somebody for lend a Pc for some minutes ;)

>For MoI, I have written all the scripts using the JavaScript language...COOL

Thank for you prompt answer, learnig every day.