I have just returned from a visit to the US including spending a day at Bentley Systems and going to the ACADIA Conference.

As a practical guy I find the process of software development deeply intriguing. The kinds of things that seem totally obvious to us poor users appears somewhat through the looking glass when seen from the developer.

The GC developers have been fairly quiet but the message is that they have been digging foundations, deep foundations. As a result the new GC will not seem revolutionary, but we have all to acknowledge this is fairly early days.

Now for the future everybody is considering how you link elegantly a design environmet to an evaluation environment (such as energy or structure). I suspect this will happen faster than the other kid on the block, digital manufacturing.

But certainly the big current items under discussion is Grasshopper v GC. GC is trying to build a new user base (and there will be things undelining that), but the big presence in that space has always been Rhino. The ease of use and the capture of the academic market by Rhino scripting has made Grasshopper as a new technology the shining kid on the corner.

Clearly it will soon cure it's lack of a scripting environment, and then GC and Grasshopper will be more head-to-head. Certainly when GC was being developed the users insisted on scripting as a corner stone and we did get it eventually.

Most of the stuff I hint at will be revealed in the next few months. The SG Workshop will certainly be running the new GC version which sits on top of 'Athens' (I inadveretently let loose the name by mistake, you will soon know though). I do assure you though that your GC skills will not need to change in this release - but what happens in the future will be hopefully more ease-of-use to make GC less of a 'rocket science' application.