Use native controls: LCL, wxWidgets
Implement custom controls: Qt, GTK
At first glance Qt looks like a great choice and is probably worth every
penny of its commercial license to the developer who needs a solid,
small, fast UI library that looks similar across platforms. But Felipe
and I discovered that there are still some oddball things with Qt,
particularly on OS X. We never could figure out how to draw buttons
reliably os OS X with the Qt widgetset since Qt appears to determine
button size and shape on its own.
At the other end there's GTK and X11, which just look plain weird on OS
X. You can see the difference from native Carbon and Cocoa apps a mile
away. Most Mac users would shy away from software that looks like this
and one could argue that producing a GTK-based app for OS X doesn't
satisfy the requirements of a project that specifies "OS X support".
GTK2 looks better on OS X but still looks alien in places, plus is very
slow and requires large external libraries be present that are never
found on OS X.
One reason why Lazarus apps on Windows look almost identical to Delphi
apps is because the LCL uses the same underlying Windows controls that
VCL uses. This will always remain one of the first points of comparison
between Lazarus and Delphi by prospective developers, i.e., how does it
look?
I believe one of the reasons why there aren't more Mac developers using
Lazarus is that they can't see past the initial shocking look of Lazarus
under GTK and X11. But hope is in the wings: Tom G. is making great
progress on the native Carbon widgetset using the underlying native
Carbon controls and maybe one day this point will be moot.
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