![]() ![]() As you can see from this table, most options involve the creation of a custom user interface for managing and presenting preferences. Providing a Preference Interfaceįor user-facing preferences, Table 1-1 lists the options for displaying those preferences to the user. The only thing that changes from release to release is the interpretation of the simple value and the objects your app creates in response. Storing simple values means that your app can always access the value. It also means that a newer version of your app has to ensure that it is able to decode objects created and written to disk using an earlier version of your app, which is potentially error prone.Ī better approach for preferences is to store simple strings and values and use them to create the objects your app needs. ![]() In the case of preferences, a stored object means decoding the object every time you access the preference. Storing objects persistently means that your app has to decode that object at some point. Although you can use an NSData object to store arbitrary objects in preferences, doing so is not recommended in most cases. The preferences system is built around property-list data types such as strings, numbers, and dates. When defining your app’s preferences, it is better to use simple values and data types whenever possible. Apps use preferences to track user-initiated and program-initiated configuration changes. Most preferences are stored persistently and therefore do not change between subsequent launch cycles of your app. ![]() The user defaults system manages the storage of preferences for each user. It may be that I have to eventually just 'give up' and write my own simple library around the defaults binary but I thought it wouldn't hurt to try to query others to see if there was an existing solution.Next Previous About the User Defaults System Since I am also starting to use Ruby more, I would also like to find a Ruby library with similar functionality. Ideally I would like to find a library that would make it easy to read from (and as a bonus write to) the OSX defaults system in a way similar to the following python psudo code. Recently while trying another search for a Python library I changed the search terms to something using something like NSUserDefaults (I have now forgotten the exact term) I found a Python library called userdefaults but it was developed for an older version of OSX (10.2) with an older version of Python (2.3) and I have not had much luck in getting it to compile on OSX 10.6 and Python 2.6 I thought of trying to read the plist files directly but it seems like the plist libraries I have found (such as the built in python one) are only able to read the XML ones (not the binary ones) which is a problem if I ever set anything with the defaults program since it will convert it back to a binary plist. I have been attempting to search via google off and on for a library to use the OSX defaults system which ends up being somewhat difficult when "defaults" is part of your query string. When I try to do a similar thing in Python or Ruby it tends to be a little more annoying since you have to do additional work to check the return code of defaults to see if there is an error. ![]() When writing a shell script using simple bash commands, it is easy enough to use backticks to call the defaults binary to read the preferences and if there is an error reading the preference, the script stops execution and you can see the error and fix it. Recently I have become a fan of storing various settings used for my testing scripts in the OSX defaults system as it allows me to keep various scripts in git and push them to github without worrying about leaving passwords/settings/etc hardcoded into the script. ![]()
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