LazProgger and dbannon, I understand your viewpoint, but respectfully disagree. There are much more popular tools that provide a OS-independent widgetset. For example, Java, Electron and QT are all mature tools that can be deployed to different operating systems. However, in striving for platform independence they tend to look out of place on all systems. What is impressive about the LCL is that it targets the native widgetset, so the resulting applications look professional and are easy to deploy (having few library dependencies).
This necessarily places some constraints on design, which are documented, e.g.
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Cocoa_Internals/ButtonsThe LCL does provide a few widgets that use the Themes drawing (e.g. SpeedButton) - and these will tend to be more platform independent (e.g. they do not use a native base Cocoa class). You can choose these to get a bit more platform independence, but these artificial widgets also tend to need a lot of maintenance, and may look out of place with future OS updates (for example, the MacOS dark mode has revealed some weaknesses with relying on these non-native components).
I personally believe that Lazarus fills a small but important niche providing professional quality, native compiled, native widgetset, low dependency applications. I think the proper solution will be in documenting the way to use anchors to align widgets across platforms. A few tutorials would go a long way here. This is a great start:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Anchor_Sides http://wiki.freepascal.org/Autosize_/_LayoutAs an aside, I think the 1.9 SVN has made terrific strides - Ondrej's DPI-aware TImageList provides a cross-platform method to support high-dpi screens, and Dmitiry's progress on Cocoa has been staggering (building on Felipe's seminal work). There are a few rough edges, but the vast majority of the LCL works. With community help, I think we can push Cocoa out of alpha-state and the next big (2.0?) Lazarus release will be a quantum jump forward.
I also think Hansaplast provided a nice example of how a few minor tweaks could enhance the appearance. Once the foundation of the Cocoa widgetset is finished the community can work on the details. I think it is fantastic that we are now able to focus on these details, it demonstrates the main Cocoa IDE is really coming together.
http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,39396.90.html