[Mono-osx] Using native Cocoa WebKit for System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser on Mac OS X

[Alex Shulgin]

Lee V.Andrus wrote:
> I too am interested in accessing the Cocoa API (perhaps even replacing  
> the entire Carbon Driver: see "http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-osx/2009-May/002297.html 
> ").  But that is a big job and I have not had much luck recruiting  
> help.  I do not have an answer for Alex's question, although a Carbon- 
> free driver would not be dependent on Carbon Events.  Can we work  
> together on this or some aspect of using Cocoa?

I too feel the need for replacing Carbon-based driver with the 
Cocoa-based one.  However, because I'm doing mono on Mac stuff for my 
job, would I have time to contribute on this part very much depends on 
the needs and interests of my employer.  So I can't answer this question 
now, but may be I could go for it later. :)

> On a smaller scale, I have been considering implementing the  
> unimplemented Carbon Driver methods supporting Notification Icons,  
> those little icons that some Windows applications or background  
> processes display at the right end of the task bar and one of the  
> largest concentrations of not-implemented exceptions in the Carbon  
> Driver.  The closest equivalent is "Menu Bar Status Items", the little  
> icons some Mac applications or background processes display at the  
> right of the menu bar.  However, the only way I have found to access  
> them is via the Cocoa classes NSStatusBar and NSStatusItem.  Alex's  
> example may be helpful in accessing them, but adding a dependency on  
> yet another package like Monobjc to WinForms seems to be a big step.   
> Also, the Apple documentation discourages their use and suggests  
> adding menu items to the dock tile menu of the application instead.   
> Naturally, that would not work too well for background tasks that do  
> not have dock tiles.

I didn't have a look on notifications, but from what I've seen the fancy 
ones (with round shape, fade effects, etc.) are most probably can only 
be done using Cocoa.  I've used Monobjc for the sake of example's 
simplicity.  Maybe we can try Cocoa-sharp or some similar wrapper, e.g. 
by extracting the only needed parts?..

--
Regards,
Alex