// the take
A declarative framework for building iOS settings-style screens on MonoTouch (the old name for Xamarin.iOS), either through a fluent Elements API or a reflection-based binder that turns a plain C# class into a table UI. It's aimed at people who were doing early Xamarin.iOS work and didn't want to hand-write UITableViewSource boilerplate for every settings page.
The Elements API is genuinely well designed — using C# object/collection initializers to nest RootElement > Section > Element reads almost like the UI tree it produces, and LINQ composes naturally into it (the MIX conference session-list example is a good illustration). The reflection-based BindingContext (attributes like [Section], [Entry], [Date], [RadioSelection]) turns a POCO into a full settings screen with almost no code, which is a real productivity win for the common case. It ships pull-to-refresh, incremental search filtering, and an ImageLoader with bounded concurrency and an LRU cache built in, so you're not reinventing those for every app. The Element base class and IElementSizing interface make custom cells straightforward to add without touching the rest of the framework.
It targets MonoTouch/Xamarin.iOS, a platform Microsoft has fully retired in favor of .NET for iOS and .NET MAUI — this won't build against current tooling, and porting it is a non-trivial rewrite, not a recompile. The last push date is misleading; there's no sign of actual modernization work, just housekeeping on a project that's effectively frozen. The JsonElement path that builds UI from a remote JSON URL is asking for trouble if that URL isn't fully trusted — it's parsing structure and behavior from network data with no mention of validation. The reflection-based BindingContext is convenient but opaque: debugging why a field didn't render the attribute you expected means stepping through Reflect.cs rather than reading your own code, and there's no compile-time check that your model shape actually produces a sane UI.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →