For whatever reason, I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of negativity and incivility on this forum lately. I won’t name names, but it seems like many users come here to vent or yell at McNeel employees, demanding this or that feature, bug fix, or functionality change. I think valid issues, presented in a civil manner, are totally welcome here, but it seems like nothing is going to change the tone of the Discourse (pun intended).
I’m not proposing any fixes — the guidelines already cover how things should be, and of course if we all followed that it would be great (and most do!) — instead, I’d just like to take the time to say a great big thank you to the incredible team at McNeel. Maybe a little positivity and love will serve to balance out the occasional nastiness in some small way
Rhino is an incredible piece of software. It’s easy to be precise, to be fast, to explore fluidly, to model complex objects, environments, and systems. Basically everything you can do exists in parity across buttons, menus, command-line options, and API access (with few exceptions) — this means it’s easy to explore and discover new features, and it’s also easy to become fast and fluid with the tools. Immense customizability with aliases, workspace preferences, and so on, means you can really shape Rhino into the creative tool you need as a designer.
Critical business decisions — like remaining a private company rather than being beholden to shareholders, commitment to public WIPs, releasing software when it’s ready rather than on some arbitrary deadline, deep and consistent engagement with users through personal messages, events, and visits — are also a big part of why Rhino is such a great product. Sure, nobody’s more excited for GH2 to come out than me (seriously, nobody) but I’m willing to wait because I know it’s gonna be great.
Speaking of Grasshopper… man, now that’s a genius piece of software. I could write a whole book about why it’s brilliant. It opened up a whole generation of people to computational thinking, and I know my life and career would look pretty different today if Grasshopper hadn’t totally re-configured my brain. I know of no better environment — even today, 12 years after its first release! — for the translation of architectural and geometric logic into code. The UI is so thoughtfully constructed and clever (ok, the learning curve might be a little steep) that it has continued to impress, surprise, and delight me for the decade I’ve been using it. It remains an essential tool for my professional work as well as my creative practice.
I’m also really pleased by some of the newer developments in the Rhino ecosystem — things like Rhino for Mac, Yak, RhinoCompute, and Rhino.Inside open up new frontiers and make me excited for the future.
I could go on gushing, but let’s leave it at this: I have so much love and esteem for the folks at McNeel for the work they do building amazing software and fostering such a great community. Over my career I’ve talked to so many people working in and around design and computation… and I hear genuine love for Rhino and GH more than any other product or tool. So keep up the good work, and if the haters are ever getting you down, don’t lose sight of the rest of us out here who truly, genuinely, love what you’re building.