Grasshopper designer for Android / iOS?

Grasshopper
1

Hi! Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had an app (official/ unofficial) for Android and iOS?
Like… I get a lot of my ideas of how to solve certain “challenges” on the move and hence can’t just open my laptop mid-street and start designing (let alone people with desktop).
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It would also help students in schools because you could design the grasshopper script and just probe it later when they are in class (most of us can’t afford the 200€ “student” licence)…
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How difficult would such an app be?
Who could I contact about it?
Maybe if it already exists - can you point me to it?
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Thanks everyone and happy scripting/designing
GC

2 Likes
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That’s a wish for me too, these days. If mcneel forum could collaborate to create a standalone app for Android/iOS, it would be ideal. This way, you could work with Grasshopper while you’re on the subway, bus, or elsewhere.

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I don’t mean to be a negative ninny, but I can think of lots of reasons why there will never be an Android version of Grasshopper/. And don’t even get me started on an IOS version.

  1. GH depends on lots of compiled modules in Rhino, and none of these will work in Android.
  2. Even if they did work, they are proprietary to McNeel, and McNeel won’t give up those rights.
  3. And even if McNeel would give up the rights there are not enough people who know how to write Android code that would interface with the Rhino subroutines.
  4. Ditto all the above for the code inside GH itself.
  5. I don’t know how many people work on GH code, but it’s extremely unlikely that McNeel would hire and train more developers just to do an Android version.
  6. Android screens are too small to show enough of a GH file to make is usable - let alone show a Rhino screen to show the results of a GH script.
  7. Google controls Android, and Google long ago gave up on it’s original mantra of “First, do no evil.”
  8. Android devices don’t have all the keyboard keys required to use GH.
  9. It is highly unlikely that the people who developed all the GH and Rhino add-ons would re-develop them for Android - even if they knew how to do it.

Those of us who are active GH/Rhino users have some idea of what it takes to make all this software work, but we really don’t know any of the details. This reminds me of a saying I learned when I was dealing with DOD classified stuff: “Those who talk don’t know. And those who know don’t talk”

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I use remote-connection apps like team viewer and jump desktop to connect devices like iphone and ipad to my pc, and it’s working pretty well

of course you have to trade some “operability” due to using fingers instead of mouse (expecially the 200 different types of clicks you can do with a mouse) but I also found some bluetooth mice on Amazon that are fully recognized as mouse on iPad and work 100% as if you were at the desktop station

of course, this requires some sort of internet connection at both ends