Support Mac OS X 10.8 (which doesn’t support initWithSuiteName).As a tradition, let’s start off some funky and tangible ways to understand UserDefaults at an extremely high level. It counts on file access.ĭo yourself a favor and stick to using Cocoa’s built-in methods instead, unless you have to Shared preferences in a sandbox environment. Research I encountered at least one fairly high profile library that promises to synchronize To share user defaults! There is no guarantee that the file representation is correct. This is also important if you use any libraries or frameworks that depend on direct file access In order to get a “clean start” the caching system may very well replace that file with theĬached information at next launch! Using lete in terminal will always work. In fact many times it’s not sufficient to to delete an application’s preferences file The settings in our favorite apps and learn to use the defaults command in the terminal This means that we have to change our lifelong habit of modifying plist files directly to change The user defaults system works perfectly fine with this caching onlyĭirect access to the preferences’ plist files is risky. Since Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) user defaults are cached by the operating system, even when synchronize is used. If your ownĪpplication requires two way exchange, apt use of synchronize and some simple logic should This example is also one-way only because the plugins don’t modify user defaults.
To include any or all defaults that you want to copy. This example only copies a nested group of defaults in the JSDKeyTidyTidyOptionsKey (becauseīalthisar Tidy doesn’t have a need to share all defaults), but it’s trivial to rework this NSUserDefaults * mirroredDefaults = initWithSuiteName : ] … addObserver : self selector: ( handleUserDefaultsChanged :) name : NSUserDefaultsDidChangeNotification object : ] … - ( void ) handleUserDefaultsChanged :( NSNotification * ) note Refactor this for your own circumstances, but it’s as easy as:
Subclassing could have been an option, but it seems unnecessary and complicates the NIBs for without any convenient mechanism to override this.
Apple’s own code Apple’s own code, such as NSUserDefaultsController also hard-wires to Modify third party libraries without an accepted pull request. The folks who wrote some of the libraries you use did this too. StandardUserDefaults, but it ignores two critical things: Frameworks and Libraries Just as you are guilty of unfettered direct use of , Would allow your application to write into the Application Suite defaults instead of Refactoring all of these direct calls into, say, a shared instance in an app is trivial, and it Into the shared suite if you want to expose those settings to the other applications in your However just becauseĪn application is the main application doesn’t excuse it from the need to write its preferences This away as we should perhaps have done - sprinkles this in liberally. instance, and a lot of code - instead of abstracting NSUserDefaults * localDefaults = initWithSuiteName : ] The Hangupīalthisar Tidy (like many applications and frameworks) has come to rely on the always-available Prefixed with your Developer Team ID, for example, -Tidy.prefs.īoth plugins then have access to the shared user defaults by accessing them from the defaults Application Groups to the Rescueįortunately Apple has allowed the user of Application Groups as a mechanism for sharing userĭefaults between applications that are signed by the same development team, and ( importantly!) Neither the Service nor the Action is entirely useful withoutīeing able to access Balthisar Tidy’s user defaults, which control how tidy will processĪnd format the HTML. Their own sandbox, and this includes the sharing of user defaults.īalthisar Tidy implements the Tidy Service as a faceless app in the main bundle rather thanįorcing the entire application to open each time the Service is invoked, and its Action is, ofĬourse, packaged as a plugin. Sandboxing intentionally makes it difficult for applications to access resources outside of Simply mirror your standardUserDefaults into it using the notification system. In your main application create an instance of NSUserDefaults using the shared suite and then
Specifically how to deal with NSUserDefaultsController that’s used in Interface Builder so Indeed a great help), they all unsatisfactorily didn't address the user interface aspect, “Application Groups” in order to share user defaults.Īlthough there are many articles out there that describe how this might be done (and they were
Given that Extensions require theĬontaining application to be sandboxed, it finally came time to figure out how to use Apple's (for Yosemite and higher) Action Extension support. The next release of Balthisar Tidy will include two awesome features: Services support and