Ambar-Xamarin

Ambar is a macOS Menu Bar app developed with Xamarin and C#. This project aims to show developing a menu bar app for macOS in C#.

Update

Using Ambar as the base, I was able to build Carol - a minimal and beautiful lyrics app for macOS. Check it out.

Why

It is for the folks wanting to start developing for macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS but do not want to delve into Swift/Obj-C and are already comfortable with C# and .Net technologies.

Tools Required

1. Visual Studio for Mac
2. Xcode

Steps

Here is how you can do it -

1. In Xcode, delete Window Controller Scene from Main.storyboard and provide Storyboard ID to View Controller.
2. Add new entry in info.plist - Application is agent (UIElement) with its value set to Yes to make the app behave as a ghost.
3. Create a Menu Bar status item using CreateStatusItem() method of NSStatusBar.
4. Handle status bar icon for dark and light theme using Template property of NSImage.
5. Handle event handling of status item using Selector class of ObjCRuntime.
6. Show a popover using NSPopover and its Show() method.
7. Make popover show on demand and hide when user moves on using NSEvent and a custom class.
8. In Xcode, add a button to View Controller and create an action QuitApplication by control + drag. In VS, call Terminate method of NSApplication.

Unless stated otherwise, everything is done in Visual Studio for Mac.

To-do

• Add a Contextual Menu to show options.
• Add a Launch at Login setting.
• Add a About window.

Contribute

If you think this project can be improved to show more of what can be done using Xamarin and C#, you are welcome to contribute. If you build something epic using it, just let me know.