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The Technology of iCircuit 3D

praeclarum.org

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: The Technology of iCircuit 3D

#3
Very cool, but seems like a bizarre choice to use C# and then lock in to Apple’s stuff. If you’re making a 3D app with C# you might as well use Unity. Something like this could even find an audience on Steam.

Re: The Technology of iCircuit 3D

#4
post #3

Very cool, but seems like a bizarre choice to use C# and then lock in to Apple’s stuff. If you’re making a 3D app with C# you might as well use Unity. Something like this could even find an audience on Steam.

He used what he is productive in though and there is nothing wrong with that. Obj-C and (to a lesser extent) Swift are pretty alien to a long-time .NET developer. The author of this app is very active in the Xamarin space and recently contributed enhancements for Catalyst support.

Re: The Technology of iCircuit 3D

#8
post #4
post #3

Very cool, but seems like a bizarre choice to use C# and then lock in to Apple’s stuff. If you’re making a 3D app with C# you might as well use Unity. Something like this could even find an audience on Steam.

He used what he is productive in though and there is nothing wrong with that. Obj-C and (to a lesser extent) Swift are pretty alien to a long-time .NET developer. The author of this app is very active in the Xamarin space and recently contributed enhancements for Catalyst support.

I’m a little surprised he went with SceneKit for rendering. I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon, but it also hasn’t received a lot of love from Apple in the past several years.

Edit: of course it can be great to use what you are comfortable with. Done (and really, really good, is better than perfect.

The way he is using property definitions with SetUndoableProperty seems like a really good fit for Swift’s property wrappers. Instead of writing getter and setters for every property you could just write them in once in the property wrapper definition and then annotate each property with @Undoable.

Re: The Technology of iCircuit 3D

#9
post #2

Kind of neat. Why not async and TPL instead of all the manual locking?

There is tons of TPL (Task Parallel Library, async and await), I was just trying to keep the blog simple. Once you have thread-safe primitives, you can build higher level abstractions on top of those. In fact I worked a bit on the TPL when I worked at Microsoft so I definitely abuse it. :-)

Re: The Technology of iCircuit 3D

#10
Can't wait to buy the original iCircuit, just need it to support vacuum tubes... Any plans to do that or are you really focusing on the Arduino/digital hobby?

This might have use for layout prototyping, thinking about it. But until it has tubes I don't need it.

Nice work - really does look good.

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