[Mono-osx] Menu Bar for Mac OS X?

Tue Apr 6 03:00:55 EDT 2010

I think the GUI toolkit path depends on the particular scenario of your project.

Let's consider a scenario.  Your application is primarily a console app, and the GUI is just a convenience.  The tool is for internal company users only, and the tool is for practical internal company uses only.  90% of the time the program runs on Windows or Linux (or Solaris etc).  And most (if not 100%) of the Mac users also use Windows and/or Linux.  Supporting Mac at all is somewhat questionable in terms of actual productivity - but you'd still like to make a reasonable for the "low hanging fruit".  Developing and maintaining two (or three) copies of the GUI code may be a very low priority thing.  Developer time is expensive, and there may be higher priority things to work on than developing a separate and more native GUI for Mac OS X - for this particular project.  However, if there's a language and GUI toolkit that does a reasonably good job with cross-platform GUI (even on Mac OS X), then writing the app using that toolkit might be a nice advantage to consider.

A separate (and more specific) example would be a cross-platform GUI tool that is mostly GUI, where you're just trying to present some useful functionality.  This tool lets you draw and resize boxes on a screenshot to specify masks for automated tests (and might have some additional functionality to it, such as cropping the image).  Most of the screen is just a single image viewer widget, and some menus.  The GUI may sound small, but still - we don't want to waste time writing (and maintaining) this app twice (once for Windows/Linux and once for Mac OS X).

In both these scenarios, I'm assuming that we are starting the application development from scratch.  In my first example, for writing two copies of all that GUI code - the cost is much more than the benefit.  In my second example, it's mostly just a GUI (there isn't much of a model) - so writing the GUI twice would mean writing (and maintaining) the entire application twice (or thrice) (plus, the GUI is simple enough that it should be easy to make it look reasonable on Mac OS X - especially if we only use widgets that have a corresponding widget on all 3 platforms).

thank you for info

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Brehm" <ajbrehm at gmail.com>
To: mono-osx at lists.ximian.com
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2010 2:06:12 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Re: [Mono-osx] Menu Bar for Mac OS X?

Joanna Carter wrote:
> 
> 
> Hmmm. I used to think Marc Hoffman was just a Mac fanboy when he would go
> on about his love for the Xcode/IB IDE. Now, I find myself preferring it
> more than either Delphi or VS. And its that annoying thing with Apple
> products that I can't tell you what it is about Xcode that I prefer, apart
> from that old chestnut "it just works" :-)
> 

Xcode is clean and forces you to design everything. That's good. The
external GUI designer makes it easier to understand what the relationship
between the code and the GUI really is.

The bad part is that Cocoa code is not portable.

If Yellow Box for Windows were still available we wouldn't have this
discussion. From what I have seen Yellow Box programs looked native enough
on Windows. Unfortunately Apple cancelled that product in 1997 after they
just got it from Next.

>> In general, and this is what I like about Xcode, it is good if the IDE
>> and
>> framework force the developer to pay some attention to OO design.
> 
> After five years of designing MVP and OPF frameworks for .NET and having
> to provide designers to help people write good OO code, I really
> appreciate having the Xcode IDE do it all for me, so I don't have to do
> all that groundwork again.
> 

At this point I have too many IDEs on my computer.

> BTW, did you know I have written a tutorial on Mac development, especially
> aimed at ex-Windows developers?
> 

I second the link to it request.

--
Joanna Carter
Carter Consulting

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