Plugins - crossplatform

[dan]

@jeff_hammond

so i assume plugins for mac will need to be specifically tailored to mac.(is that right?)

It depends. Yes, normally.

@jeff_hammond

using this plugin by david for example…why won’t that work on mac too? how much additional work/knowledge by the writer would be needed to make it work on mac&pc?

This is a great example. It does work on OS X, with zero code changes. Here, give it a try…ExplodedView.macrhi (12.4 KB) - UPDATED on 11/4/2015

How much additional knowledge? That depends on the scope of the plugin. In the case of ExplodedView, very little additional knowledge was necessary to get it to work in Rhino for Mac. All the necessary information to do that is here. The important part to note is that David did not have to make any changes to his code…as long as he is writing using C# and making calls with RhinoCommon, getting it to work on Mac is trivial.

@jeff_hammond

are there possibilities down the road which will make it easy (or easier) for cross platform plugins? (like how python is… i can write a script and it will work on windows too.)

It can always be easier I guess I don’t understand this question, because it does work. If you’d like to know how, start here.

Stepping back a little…David says:

@DavidRutten

Assemblies that use only standard framework assemblies and RhinoCommon should work on both Windows and Mac without modification. That is, the the same binary should load and execute you shouldn’t even have to compile two versions.

At the moment, you do have to compile two versions, but they are essentially the same. (We’re currently working on some approaches that could make it easier to “just use the same binary.”) That said, the amount of work needed to compile on each platform is very small…and there are many good reasons that you should compile on each platform anyway.