Interview
The future of Rhino At the recent Shape To Fabrication conference Bob McNeel, CEO of Robert McNeel & Associates, was his usual straight-talking self when quizzed about the future of Rhino, including the Mac version, the cloud, parametrics and Grasshopper. Q: Are you busy working on Rhino 6? Bob McNeel: The answer is no; they won’t let me touch the code! We try to get something out in the field as soon as we have something that’s stable enough to use, and they’ve been working on since shortly after Rhino 5 came out. Of course there’s always service releases and other distractions to slow it down, but there’s been a lot of work going on — particularly on the back-end, on the parts that they want to overhaul, messy bits of code that have been there since version one, things like that, which you can’t do in the middle of a service release. There’s probably not anything that is earth-shaking in terms of brand new sparkly features, but at least we’ve got something that doesn’t tip over when you try to run it. There are a few people that want to get something out when we get back, I don’t know if we’ve got everything in place to do that yet, and I try not to make promises for things. Q How is the Mac version coming along? BM: This is another place where we need a little bit of expectation control. As some of you know, porting from one platform to another is a major project. Also, Rhino is a very deeply embedded Windows product; we use a lot of Windows resources. The tag line for the first 20 years was something like ‘Nurbs modelling for Windows’. So it’s been a bit of a chore to untangle a lot of Windows code. There are a lot of development tools for the third-party applications — there’s just no one-to-one correlation. Initially we’re probably not going to see any third-party products available for it right away, because not only is there a lot more work for us to port it, but it’s going to be a lot of work for third party developers. Some of our products, particularly Grasshopper, is very much a Windowsbased product and it will take quite a bit of time to get that untangled and ported, 22
May / June 2014
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Bob McNeel, CEO of Robert McNeel & Associates, engages the Shape To Fabrication audience
so that’s not going to be available first release either.
Q: Are there plans to increase Rhino’s 2D drawing output capabilities?
Q: Will it be available in the Apple App Store?
Q: When is it likely to ship?
BM: 2D drafting or drawing is always something that’s on our list of things to upgrade, so you will see some continued improvements there in Version 6, there’s quite a bit of work going on on that front. We’re not particularly paying any attention to any other product in the terms of how it works. Really we’re dealing with the feedback we’re getting from people, what they’re asking for, what their workflows are.
BM: We’re pretty feature complete in terms of what we think we can get done reasonably for version one.
Q: With other vendors increasingly focussing on the cloud, how are you approaching it?
Q: Is Grasshopper 1 going to be a part of Rhino 6?
BM: We watch these things, there’s some interesting things going on there — from my perspective you think about it like porting to another development platform, it’s probably as much if not more work than it was to port to the Mac. It doesn’t seem to be something that people are demanding immediately, I think people have ideas that it’s the solution for problems they have, particularly when working with large data sets or large work groups, and I certainly want to make sure we address those problems over time. If using cloud technology helps that
BM: Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we put something in the App Store we don’t get to provide a SDK or plug-in architecture, so my guess is that we’re not going to distribute it that way.
BM: That’s the idea. One of the things we’re trying to do is to provide a stable development platform for people who are developing for Grasshopper so that there’s not a situation where it’s a ‘moving target’. We’re going to try and get that wrapped up for Version 5 so that there’s a stable version there as well. We’ll move that forward on to 6 as well as Version 6 being the development platform for Grasshopper 2 — some of that work has already started.
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20/5/14 15:13:06
