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iMeem

January 27th, 2006 · Comments · Default

I wasn’t really impressed with the new iMeem buzzword enabled chat application until a bunch of us from #macsb poked under its hood and saw Mono sitting there. It looks like the first non-trivial (correct me if I’m wrong) Mono application has shipped for Mac OS X. And what’s more it looks good. It looks just like a native Cocoa application. Not surprising considering it uses a C# to Cocoa bridge (and not Cocoa# because apparently that sucks). You can download the bridge here. This definitely changes the face of cross-platform development on the Mac, I wonder if Google is taking note.

More linke: http://zacwhite.com/blog/?p=36

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  • Just an update/reply to the request for correction on Mono use:

    Unity (http://otee.dk) has it's scripting language running on Mono. It's certainly far from a trivial application.
    The decision to use Mono over Python or Lua or other was a master stroke. You can code in whatever scripting language you like and the output is compiled to bytecode so it runs faster anyway (and can be ported to "the other platform" if needed).
  • Yes! iMeem deserves credit. Lots of it - for choosing to do the UI in native Cocoa :)

    Now if only this bridge would let me deploy a Cocoa-based UI on Windows!
  • I think they deserve credit for shipping it, making it look very pretty and keeping the disk image below 10MB. I wonder where the line is between their GUI code and their back-end. It seems to use CoreData for storage (chat logs perhaps) which implies that the Cocoa (Dumbarton) side is more than just a mere GUI.
  • Thanks for pointing this out. I probably wouldn't have bothered to sign up for an account just to try out the app, if you hadn't posted a teaser!

    Mono looks cool, but let's not give more credit here than is due. The application *is* a Cocoa app, that's why it looks like one. They are clearly developing the UI independently from the back-end. In other words, the part that looks good and like a Mac took work.

    I found this page on their site describing "Dumbarton," their bridging mechanism between ObjC and C#:

    http://allan.imeem.com/blogentry/gbgC7kTg
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