Michael, I'm sure that this has been asked before but initially one of your goals was for MOI tablet usage. With the new generation of android tablets flooding the market I am curious if you have any plans to tap into it. I ask now because I just bought an Asus Slider and see that it actually has a lot of functionality to it.

I am doing allot of site surveys on drilling rigs and while my 17" laptop runs MOI/Solidworks (everything I need) i just got tired of luggin it around the globe through airports. Since this tablet will read off external hard drives no problem including my cad drawings and all the files, the only thing left that is missing from my lighter toolset is creation using MOI. I acknowledge that it will not support my 200-300mb models but smaller ones should be functional.

I see you have made inroads to MacOS which is great for MOI, tablets could also be a great tool for quick design as was one of your initial goals.

The price points of apps are not friendly to the deployment but since I already have a license I would pay some amount to have it work on my tablet($30-$40) as well. Of course I am not trying to direct a price for such a thing but I would imagine that the hardware limitations would be the driving factor for how large an assembly could be.

all kidding aside....this is really your fault ;)....if you had not made MOI so good that it became a large part of my toolset I would not be asking...

Hi Grendel, although MoI was originally targeted specifically for tablet use, the primary focus on that has generally waned over time mostly because there has just been more interest in the overall ease of use that sort of came along with some of those design constraints.

It's not that I want to abandon it, but it is not really the #1 focus of the application anymore - just general ease of use and fluid workflow and lower learning curve have become much larger things.

Also the main tablet focus for MoI was actually a pen tablet, not a finger-touch style approach. There is kind of a mismatch between trying to do accurate type work just by smudging things with your finger. I mean there's a reason why artists use pencils, pens, and brushes to do a lot of stuff instead of only 100% finger painting...

Anyway, aside from that Android is a completely different operating system that runs with a totally different CPU than windows machines. That's a big contrast to the Mac which uses the same CPU - running on the same CPU is a key thing that has made the Mac version a lot easier for me to achieve. Because that's not present on Android, it means that the particular mechanism that I used for producing the Mac OSX port is not possible to do with Android.

So there would be a tremendous amount of work involved with making an actual Android MoI port, it is very unlikely to be feasible anytime soon to schedule the several years worth of work that would be involved. A whole lot of work would be involved just simply in me doing research and studying how to produce Android apps, and learning how their API is set up, etc... It takes quite a lot of time to learn how everything works when you're writing code for a system that will involve all kinds of GUI elements and UI interaction.


A couple of things you can do though might be to use one of the remote desktop type apps so that you could connect your Android tablet to a desktop computer and run the software remotely. There are various packages available for doing that, see this previous discussion thread for some ideas on that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4644.1

Another possible approach for you could be to use a Windows TabletPC slate device rather than an Android tablet, a TabletPC runs Windows and can just run MoI directly. ASUS has a pretty nice one called the EEE Slate, see here for some previous discussion on that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4322.1


But I'm sorry - a MoI version running directly on your Android tablet is not likely to happen.


- Michael

And also all the same stuff I mentioned above also applies to the iPad as well - iPads also run a totally different CPU than desktop Macs, so it's the same situation in that it is not possible to use the same porting approach to make an iPad version of MoI as I used for making a regular Mac OSX version.

- Michael

I understand your reasoning 100%, just curious about the chances.

I had looked at the slate but the reason for going with the slider was the attached keyboard and the slate was equal to the cost of my laptop almost.