Hi simpleday, sorry no Moi does not run on an iPad or iPhone, both of which use a totally different kind of CPU chip than your desktop computer.

The best you'd be able to do would be to use a remote desktop type app as described above to view your desktop screen on the iPad.

- Michael

Dear Michael,

I am very interested in using MOI on an iPad. Is is it absolutely impossible or how big is the effort to get it running on iPad? Are we talking about days, week, years?

I would love to do 3D printing design workshops with Moi on the ipad.

By the way workshop, do you offer some kind of provision for customers who buy the software because of my workshop? If it does noch work on iPads, we have to use Laptops...

Best,
Philip

Hi Philip,

> Is is it absolutely impossible or how big is the effort to get it running on iPad? Are we
> talking about days, week, years?

It's really hard to make an accurate estimate, but my guess is probably several years. MoI was designed to be used with a pointing device like a mouse or a pen. To be used on the iPad with touch instead would really need a new design in many areas.

In addition to that many of the libraries that MoI uses do not have an iOS version - the iPad uses a totally different kind of CPU than a regular Mac computer.

So it's pretty involved because of such a major switch in the fundamental interaction mechanism and computing platform.

I'm also not that excited about the iPad ecosystem myself, it seems to revolve around things like $5 lightweight apps trying to bring them to a huge number of people - that's just not really what I'm personally focused on doing.

All these things factored together make it very unlikely to happen. It already takes an enormous amount of my time just supporting 2 desktop versions as it is.


> By the way workshop, do you offer some kind of provision for customers who buy the
> software because of my workshop? If it does noch work on iPads, we have to use Laptops...

If you want to put MoI on a bunch of laptop computers for use in some sort of lab type setting, please contact me through e-mail at moi@moi3d.com and let me know what kind of quantity you are talking about and I can set up some kind of bundle discount for you.

Thanks,
- Michael

Not to mention, iOS apps must be written in Objective C on a Mac, which means depending on what language MoI is written in, could mean alot of rewriting.

Not to put too sharp a point on it, put there are several languages which can be used to develop for iOS (including for iPad). In fact, the language (I believe) Michael is working with, Qt, does have port capabilities for iOS.

That said, I suspect the refactoring of memory handling, input/output and overall api compliancy would still make it quite difficult. Plus, there's always the business question regarding could it even be profitable?

There are a couple ways others have chosen to tackle this problem. Onshape has a most unique strategy where they have all business logic in their cloud servers, written in whatever language they choose, then deliver to a browser the resulting processes using Angular, Bootstrap, JQuery and a host of other javascript frameworks.

Lastly, there is an interesting NURBS modeler just released for iPad called uMake ( https://www.umake.xyz/ ). Looks to me like an extremely light version of MoI-- and at a substantial price.