With Blender’s new App Template system, where you can build apps based on the Blender backend, is there any thought to doing the same for Grasshopper?
afaik No.
Gahhh it would be SO USEFUL. I would pay a monthly subscription for this feature, to be able to deploy my own applications!
You could use Rhino.Inside to run Rhino or Grasshopper within any application including your own .NET application. If you want it to just show Grasshopper that would work fine.
There is the ability also to use Rhino Skin to create a custom app using Rhino’s 3d viewports, picking and mouse interaction.
Or you can use Rhino Compute to bring Rhino functionality into a browser based app.
What application were you thinking?
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Sorry for my delay, I forgot about this thread. I’d like to make standalone EXEs. I don’t want to have Rhino run inside another software application because then the user would also have to have Rhino installed, which is a $1,000 prospect - unless I’m mistaken?
Rhino Skin same problem, people still have to pay $1,000 on top of whatever I might want to charge them for my software.
Rhino Compute is cool but I don’t know how to do web coding, that’s why I use Grasshopper to make my apps. 
What you might want to consider as a business case is having a Rhino3D “metaverse” that’s basically like Steam for Grasshopper based applications. Grasshopper is free to download and use and anyone can post scripts and apps to the store. People can charge a subscription or a one time price for these apps and McNeel would get a cut. You could have your own ecosystem.
EDIT: Throw a “while” loop in and people could even develop their own games and release them on your platform, and/or you could charge a larger up front fee to let them license the underlying technology to release on other stores as well, like how Epic Games used to charge $1 million for an Unreal License. Now they’ve kind of built what I just talked about but for their video game engine, which is integrated into the Epic Games Store.
Shapediver?
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The ShapeDiver platform already lets you publish and interact with Grasshopper scripts as standalone browser applications. We have plans to extend the platform to a marketplace where designers can monetize their applications in the future.
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I love Shapediver and it definitely has it’s place as a way to serve content if you have the right resources - such as traditional programming skills. I don’t have those skills.
The problem is that making an app with it’s own custom interface using Shapediver requires so much coding knowledge that if I could do that I wouldn’t be asking for this functionality.
I would just make a Blender App using Python and sell that instead. Blender Apps take the core of Blender, let you put your own splash screen and interface on top of it and sell it as a specialized tool. Which is basically what I’m asking for here.
Shapediver doesn’t fulfill this need or offer this functionality unless you know web development or have $10,000 to pay a web developer.
Rereading my previous post, I might have come across more agressive than I intended. I think I was frustrated at being recommended Shapediver because while it’s a great tool (I’m on the Partners page! lol), it’s not at all what I’m asking for. Blender’s App Template thing is great, but it also requires Python to be able to make anything useful.
The thing that really works about Grasshopper is the geometric approach to programming and lots of small quality of life things, like an output panel that lets you see the result of a node (Blender Geometry Nodes don’t even have this!).
I make software with it because it really works for me and I’m sure that’s why a lot of others use it too; but the skills required to make a program in Grasshopper and the skills required to make a UX in WebGL/Python are very different and I don’t think the overlap is very large.
So it’d be great if either Shapediver got a WYSIWYG interface builder or a Grasshopper got a software compilation ability.