I’m happy for everyone, but many people don’t understand the costs involved in production when you cover multiple systems, and in the Mac sector, these costs are rather meager in the CAD area compared to Windows, and with Linux it’s even less compared to Mac.
you keep repeating yourself quite a bit. your numbers are biased and plain wrong. pointing it out more often does not make it more right.
its called investment.
this is also a mac topic, we are not even dreaming about linux at this point.
It’s not an investment to produce for Mac if you don’t even recoup the costs. Every system is designed for specific tasks, and for CAD/structural engineering/infrastructure, that task is Windows. If I wanted to do professional video editing, I wouldn’t work on Windows and then complain about why no one is releasing their software for it.
you seem pretty invested to spoil any endeavors to develop a mac version. maybe you dont like macs, you found your tools its ok, maybe dont spoil it for others with unrelated repetitive attempts and invest your time in something productive instead.
I’m not trying to spoil anything for anyone here; I didn’t say before for nothing that I wish everyone well. But if someone has no understanding of economic principles and only ever demands things that aren’t profitable for companies, then they’re entitled to point that out, and that’s a huge difference from what you’re accusing me of. I’m not only a trained construction draftsman, but also have a background in business administration, so I can speak to that as well. For example, nobody would invest €100 if they only got €20 back.
I would have just as much understanding for companies that say, why should we release our video editing software for Windows if hardly anyone uses it and we only make a loss with it?
this talk is not going anywhere, ping ponging the same ideas over and over is still not proving or adding anything to this topic besides bloating it unnecessarily. you have pointed out your opinion multiple times, lets leave it there.
Hi!
I’m sorry for the long post, but I wanted to try to summarize everything in one place.
First of all, I want to say that developing VisualARQ for macOS is something I personally find very challenging, motivating, and honestly fun. I’d love to work on it someday.
But realistically, right now it’s not feasible for several reasons.
Technical reasons
- There is still no official Rhino C++ SDK for macOS.
- Most of the VisualARQ UI is currently built with MFC, a Microsoft C++ UI framework that only works on Windows. Supporting macOS would require rewriting the whole UI anyway, and ideally doing it in a cross-platform way so we don’t end up maintaining two separate codebases. Our plan is to gradually move the UI to Eto (like Rhino itself), probably during the VisualARQ 4 / 5 cycle.
- Most of our Grasshopper components and the VisualARQ Script API are implemented in C++/CLI, and there is currently no C++/CLI compiler for macOS. That means rewriting all of that in C#, plus creating a C interop layer between the VisualARQ C++ core and the managed side.
Economic reasons
- We currently don’t have developers with macOS experience, so we would either need to hire new people or invest significant time learning and adapting.
- The last numbers I remember (take them with a grain of salt) were around 90% Rhino Windows users vs a little over 10% macOS users. Of course this may change over time, but today most VisualARQ users come from the existing Rhino user base.
- Even if it sounds anecdotal, there are also extra costs involved: new Mac hardware for development, additional tooling, licenses, testing infrastructure, and so on.
- We’re still a relatively small team. We keep growing little by little, but we also need to be realistic about what we can take on.
Priorities
- We still have a list of missing core features and bugs that many existing users are asking us to address, and we’re trying to improve that as fast as possible.
- In the past, we’ve also received criticism when adding big new things while some basic workflows still needed work. So at the moment, we feel our first responsibility is toward the users already relying on VisualARQ every day.
That said, macOS support is definitely not something we dismiss or dislike. It’s simply a very large investment for a small team at this stage.
Enric
I use a M1 Max and got the pro subscription, as it’s not a big difference with the students discount. My workflow is mainly VisualARQ on the VIrtualmachine and if I need to render somethinge I use the Mac version of rhino. The native Mac Version of Rhino works very well, my only quirks are that the UI is slightly different. If there were a native VisualARQ version I would definitely work on it Natively
Do you use Parallels as your virtual machine? Does Visual ARQ function fine on it?
I would be interested in hearing other peoples experiences with running VisualARQ on Rhino 8 on Macbook running Parallels. I have to admit that I am frustrated with the responsiveness running VisualARQ/Rhino on a MacBook Pro with Apple M2 Max and 32 GB of Memory. Anybody else have experience with this configuration?
Hello @Greg_Bishop
I use Rhino always on parallels as I prefer windows version over Mac version.
Recently I’ve been facing challenges on Rhino 8 alone using parallels. The responsiveness is not great, I didn’t test it with visualarq.
For now I’m using Rhino 9 beta with visual arq. Rhino 9 beta alone runs better than Rhino 8 at the momento, for me at least. Visualarq have some bugs, on my side, that make me consider using it or not.
I have Apple M3 Max 128gb ram.
Totally understandable but very unfortunate too.
I have been transitioning away from Windows and for the last half year my daily driver for work has been a MacBook, and I’ve just accepted that I can’t use VisualARQ. Hopefully macOS Rhino users grow enough to make financial sense for you, and for McNeel to fully support the C++ SDK. (I think they released it as “experimental” in Rhino 9 Beta?)
Hopefully closer to VisualARQ 4, rather than 5 lol