[Mono-osx] Is native look on OS X possible?

[Iain Collins]

On 11 Feb 2009, at 09:22, Joanna Carter wrote:
<snip>
>
> Now all we have to do, to get our application to run as a native Mac
> app, is to write a small hierarchy of generic "Interactor" classes for
> the different types of controls, design the forms in Interface  
> Builder,
> and use Delphi Prism to link the C# business classes to an authentic
> Cocoa UI experience.

When I first saw mention of Delphi in this this thread I thought  
"That's crazy, why is someone going off topic and mentioning  
Delphi?" (and I think I wasn't alone in thinking that :-) but looking  
at Delphi Prism it makes more more sense.

I wonder if you - or another user of Prism -  could clarify a few  
things about how you use it in practice for Mono/Mac OS X development  
- these questions sound a bit like shill marketing questions for  
Delphi Prism but I'm genuinely interested to know more about it if it  
can stream line my cross platform Mono development, and I figure  
others might be too.

- Do you use Delphi Prism to develop all your Mono applications in, or  
just when it comes to building/rolling out Mac OS X versions?

- Do you think it offers a particularly well integrated solution for  
Mono/Mac OS X development?

For example, I have used a range of IDE's and editors from Visual  
Studio in VMware, to Eclipse and TextMate on Mac OS X.  Can you really  
do everything in just Delphi Prism (& Interface Builder), or do you  
still end up having to do a bit of fudging to glue things together?

- Lastly, it looks like Prisim is 'just' a nicely packaged up set of  
free tools (such as Mono) and a compiler in a Visual Studio shell.  
This isn't a necessarily a bad thing, it's not that expensive for a  
professional licenses and I could see it saving a lot of time and  
effort - and making things easy for developers who are not already  
familiar with Mono or Mac development to work on .NET/Mono projects.

Do you feel there is a significant benefit to using Prism over using  
existing free tools (e.g. like Mono Develop)? If there are particular  
features you like I'd be really interested to hear about them.

Regards,

-- 
Iain Collins