Learning Carbon

Chapter 10. Property Lists

Property lists offer a uniform and architecture-independent means to organize, store, and access data for your application. They are used frequently in Mac OS X, particularly by the Finder to determine what to do when it encounters an application or one of its documents. (The Finder is the application that manages the user’s desktop and mediates access to applications, documents, and other items in the file system.) Some of the most common data included in a property list are application name, version, type, creator code, and icon filename.

There are a number of reasons why you’ll need to modify your application’s property list. Property lists store essential configuration information that your program code or the operating system can access at runtime. Application name and version properties are used to display information to the user in an About window or a Finder Info window. If your application opens documents, you need to set up properties to let the Finder know which documents can be opened by your application.

You’ve already seen in Chapter 3 that a property list (the Info.plist file) is part of every Mac OS X application bundle. In Chapter 8 we discussed localizing properties that will be seen in the interface and putting them in an InfoPlist.strings file. We actually haven’t looked at the contents of an Info.plist file or taken a look at the default properties associated with a Carbon application. So, in this chapter, we’ll:

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