Mark's Odds and Ends Bug List

In no particular order, here’s a list of items I’ve ran into that remain unresolved:

Groups

Working with groups is still flaky. For starters you can’t name a group with anything that has a space in it, which is annoying as I name stuff with spaces in it all the time, and don’t even realize that the name groups dialog has gone away.

Second, I have KB shortcut to name groups, which brings up the dialog. However, if an object is selected that has a name property, and I bring up the dialog and start typing it renames the selected object rather than putting the typed text into the group name field. It’s like the dialog does not get focus when it comes up. Done this more times than I can count, only to find out long afterwards that the object has been renamed to what I thought I was naming the group (that is unless I hit the space key, then it’s renamed to whatever I typed up until l hit space.

Third: There’s no group manager (at least not that I’m aware of. There’s some variant of that on the Windows platform from what I gather, but I’ve never seen it.

Missing Utilities

The help section refers to a number of utilities that simply aren’t there. The one that irks me the most is having help refer to an RPN calc that doesn’t exist when you type it into the command line. I use PCalc all the time, but it’d be nice to not have to bring up a separate app just to do some math.

Customize Commands

Still a lot of flakiness here. The UI will let me add commands to Palettes but there’s a previously reported hardcoded limit to how many will actually show up, even though on my screen there’s boatloads of room to display them.

It takes quite a long time for the dialog to load, and if I have a large project file open when I attempt to bring it up it takes even longer.

If I create a palette from scratch there’s no way I can figure out how to actually bring it up. There’s no way of assigning an icon to a command that doesn’t have one that I can figure out (like the paneling commands), they all get the generic icon, which isn’t terribly helpful.

I’ve had cases where I saved the customize bit, closed and reopened the a project file and the changes did NOT take effect. A couple times I’ve had to redo it as many as 3 or 4 times before it would actually “take”.

Futhermore, I can’t get the paneling commands to show up as a button in the UI no matter how I approach it. The whole process of customizing commands is not covered well at all in the online help, and it’s a bit wonky. Having to close a project and re-open it just to get a changed command on one of the palettes to show up is a PITA workflow wise.

This is probably the buggiest area of Rhino from my perspective at this point. It’s clunky, decidedly un mac like, and very counter intuitive to use.

Group Flakyness

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but groups appear to be buggy.

I’ve got a 180 mb file that has a lot of layers. Some of them are no longer used, however they contain groups on them, some of which are named.

I later created a new group that had the same name as a previous group without realizing it (and Rhino doesn’t tell me I can’t). All appeared to be fine until I exported that group (along with a bunch of others) as OBJ. The OBJ file had some of the objects from the old group in it, even though that group was hidden, and on a layer that was not visible. It took a long time to figure out what had happened, and even though I turned on the old layer to attempt to delete the objects in what I think was the same named group I couldn’t select them by direct clicking, dragging a marquee around them in any direction, or any other means.

I then ungrouped the group on the layer I was attempting to export, regrouped it and gave it a similar name and exported again as OBJ. The unwanted items from the group on the hidden layer were still in the export.

Very buggy. I ended up having to delete the entire layer in order to get the export to NOT export the utterly unelectable items on the old layer with it’s visibility off.

I realize you can hold down alt to get save as to show up, but after 20+ years of using macs some things are hardcoded in my head at this point, and remembering to hold down alt is not one of them.

Just googled the whole versions thing. Dunno how I managed to not really understand that but this is quite honestly the first app I’ve encountered it’s existance in. Then again I was never one to command click, alt click or any other click in the title bar of a document window. Just has never been my thing.

This is a typical Rhino thing (not just Mac) - as spacebar is the equivalent of Enter, entering a string with a space will terminate the string there. To name things with spaces, enclose the name in quotes.

The only “group manager” in Windows Rhino (that I know of) is the dialog which comes up when you type SelGroup - and you have at least one group in the file. Otherwise there are just Group, Ungroup, AddToGroup and RemoveFromGroup…

–Mitch

Another one for the list:

Gumball and groups:

This one didn’t bite me until quite a ways down the line.

I’ve got a bunch of geometry, various groups that are grouped etc.

I’d taken the whole mess, grouped that, and rotated a copy 180 degrees around the origin.

However to get it it lined up with the polysurface it was needing to mate to I had to rotate that around another axis from the front view. What I didn’t realize until MUCH later is the gumball was ever so slightly off of center (which you can’t see until you zoom way the in, which is why I didn’t see it).

Once I discovered this I deleted the rotated copy, rotated it around the origin again, and relocated the gumboil using 0 as the origin to fix the minor offset. While this works, once a gumboil on a group is relocated it only “stays” for as long as the group is selected, and when you reselect it the minor offset rematerializes. This forces me to have to relocate the gumball every time the group is reselected and if I forget, it get bit by it. Is there some what of making a relocation for a gumball “stick” until it’s reset?

Yeah, @margaretbecker, that looks like a bug… (under “Utility functions”)

Calc
CalcRPN
WebBrowser

Not in this list:
Alerter

BTW, how do you search the Mac Rhino help?
Edit: ah, I see there is a bug filed here, the proper help doesn’t come up…

put the calculator in notification center:

if the calculator is in there, it has focus upon opening the panel… so just start typing numbers.

(just an idea)

Well I’ve got PCalc, which works, just would be nice to have it in app (or remove it from the documentation).

Been using RPN calc’s for as long as I’ve owned an HP RPN calc which has been decades. I get on an AOS calc and I have no idea what the hell to do with an “=” key.

It’s just a minor issue really, but underscores how out of sync the online help is with the reality of the UI of the Mac version.

The whole bit on customizing the UI shows so many screen shots of what is obviously the windows version, with a lot of referring to be able to create new tabs in the ribbon bar etc, which quite obviously don’t work / aren’t present in the mac version.

More than anything I’d just like a clear picture of how the UI customization ACTUALLY works.

My theme pref is set to custom so I can get the ribbon bar and the top tool palette, which essentially makes my UI completely out of sync with anything in the online help. The stock mac layout with the wide palette on the left is pretty clunky.

I find this somewhat comical: I’ve set my osnaps off on the sidebar, but there they are. I’ve got the osnap settings mapped to a spare button on my kensington trackball, as it saves a trip over to the sidebar, and gives more room for tool icons on the sidebar, yet often the snap settings show up of their own accord for no explicable reason when I have them set off.

I have no clue why the sidebar pallette selector is grayed out, it’s always been that way and I can’t figure out what I need to do to change it.

The sidebar tools= remains with the same set of tools for the Standard, Cplanes, set view, display, select, viewport layout, visibility, and transform tabs, but changes for curves, surface, solids and mesh tools.

I’d love to be able to modify what’s on there at all times, as there’s quite a few tools I use a lot regardless of what mode I’m in operations wise, and it’d be nice to have them always available. I don’t care where, just as long as I can get to them. I’m not a huge fan of floating palettes as they inevitably get in the way when you don’t want them to.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the majority of the modeling tools and overall functionality of Rhino mac is very stable and works quite well, it’s just the UI layer and presentation that’s dodgy and inconsistent. I’m not adverse to learning a new interface (Blender comes to mind as an extreme example of nonstandard UI approaches) but it helps a lot if it’s consistent and theres some type of logic to it that once you understand it and know how it’s works you can get to a point where you know to do things even if they’re foreign at first. However getting there is much harder when even the online help is out of sync with how things actually work.

I can’t count the number of times where I’ve ran into “this topic is not documented”. I get it’s a WIP / Beta, but hey, there’s an announced ship date pending, and this still feels pretty beta on that front, and UI customization may be closer than I think but without any clear and accurate docs on it, it’s pretty hard to get there.

Sorry, that would be my fault. Anything in the Help that is not in Mac Rhino is a Help bug. If you go directly to http://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/mac/help/en-us/index.htm, you get the full help. I’ll fix the errors today.

Also, the “command not documented” is another bug @stevebaer that needs to be addressed. If you search, you can find the topics, but the link to Rhino is broken.

Did you make a bugtrack item for me Margaret?

This is all part of the bug where the wrong help comes up.

This is related to: http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-28230.

I thought this was a Rhino for Mac issue. If the issue is listed under Rhino for Windows V6 with no mention of it being related to Mac Rhino, we won’t know that this has been fixed in Mac Rhino.

I’m pretty confused.

I’m confused, too. There may be another bug. Also we had a long discussion about this a month or so ago. I’ll do some further digging.

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Discovered another item this morning. My only internet connection at home is a Mobile Hotstpot. It’s slow to say the least, and doesn’t always work so good. So this morning it dropped the connection to my desktop box and I didn’t notice as I wasn’t using any web stuff at that point) and any and all help came up with a white screen (which had me thinking the Whiteout bug had migrated to the help window as well). Once I figured out the net connection was down it dawned on me that the help was pulling it’s content from an online connection.

Uh… Please tell me the help will be bundled in the the App’s resources folder. Not everybody has a full time all the time net connection, particularly when we’re paying out the nose per mb of use. I’d hate to have online help usage add $20 a month to my phone bill.

This should be good now…well, as good as you get when the commands are actually missing :blush:

Thanks for your patience with this.

Does this sound familiar?

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Kinna sorta yip.

So the only workaround in the V5 cycle will be to temporarily “block the group.” It looks like there are some enhancements to gumball vis-a-vis groups in the V6 cycle…but, since Rhino 5 for Mac is V5, I think the workaround is the best we can do for now. Not ideal, I know.

Commendations to @LewnWorx for this excellent compilation! ~Dave

I second that. It’s much appreciated.

I have but only one tiny gripe - and I hesitate to even bring it up - but here goes. The fact that these are lumped together into a single thread on Discourse makes it challenging to track (for me). I believe this - coupled with the run-up to initial commercial release - is why this did not make it on my radar until more than a month later. Perhaps this is a limitation of Discourse (we have been trying to see what we can do). Splitting them up into separate threads would be nice…

…but please don’t let the medium (or my gripe) get in the way of the message. Thanks again for the list @LewnWorx.