Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hey JD,
Just checking in to see if you were getting close to an ETA for dropping silverlight, getting pretty tired of jumping back and forth between versions.
Thanks

Sorry, I'm working on it, but I don't generally give estimates on things, and with however many thousands of people using this plugin, the switchover can't be taken lightly. We are moving from something that "just works", exactly the same, everywhere -- Silverlight -- to something that works differently -- HTML -- depending on which browser you have installed. So it takes some time; it's not for nothing that I originally chose to use Silverlight.

Well I figured an exact estimate probably wasn't going to happen, I have seen forums where people love to hold developers' feet to the fire when they miss arrival dates. I guess I was hoping for something more along the lines of "we're getting pretty close" or "we're still a pretty long ways off." I realize that wouldn't tell me all that much but I guess I was just shooting for a vague sense of where we are at.
Also, I didn't realize that the actual browser on my machine would actually be or I guess is being tasked with creating those windows. Does this create more of a maintenance headache for you since the update schedule for browsers are far more frequent than something like silverlight? Will you have to worry about rushing out patches if an update disrupts functionality? Or, do I not know what I am talking about?

Anyway, keep up the good work

Well, the basic setup, you can see if you open the Maxwell Grass dialog -- that's using the new HTML/CSS stuff, not Silverlight, and it's non-critical to the plugin's operation, so it's sort of been playing guinea pig. But it's also a pretty simple dialog, not having things like texture previews, material preview, color pickers, etc. That stuff, I wrote in Silverlight, which was one thing, and it has all had to be redone now in HTML/CSS, which is quite another.

And you're correct in your appraisal of the situation -- standard UI for plugins in SketchUp is done through the browser: the plugin windows are browser windows, created by the OS, on behalf of SketchUp. You request the window via ruby, and use ruby either to put some HTML directly into it, or set it to point to some HTML file. So Silverlight and Flash are attractive here, as you guessed, for the same reason they're attractive elsewhere: they insulate you from the browser. It is icing on the cake that they are more capable environments than HTML for writing UI. Once you get to the HTML side of things, though, it's a different world; SketchUp is aimed at a decidedly less technical audience, as far as CG goes, so we need to think about what happens when somebody is running an old XP machine, with IE6 -- it's one thing, in that situation, to put up some HTML that says "hey, go get Silverlight" and it's another for the UI to just appear as a mangled mess.