Re: "First Run" installation of Application support stuff?

FROM : John C. Randolph
DATE : Wed Dec 18 22:09:04 2002

On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 11:26 AM, Bill Bumgarner wrote:

> On Tuesday, Dec 17, 2002, at 16:11 US/Eastern,
> <email_removed> wrote:
>> Its not a big deal to update a pref file  residing in the app folder
>> from
>> within your app. If a user moves the pref file out of the app folder,
>> a new
>> one will be created and the old prefs are lost, but that is no
>> different for
>> prefs in the pref folder.
>
> I have to chime in here...
>
> Do not ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, store prefs in
> the app folder.  It is a bad, bad idea no matter what way you look at
> it.    It is just lazy.  There are places to store writable stuff that
> are well documented and well convered in this thread.  In the app
> wrapper is NOT ONE OF THEM.

[Bill's excellent exposition of why this is true snipped]

I'll just chime in here, too.

Bill is 100% correct.  Prefs are user data, they are not attributes of
an app.  Writing them into the app wrapper is an outdated habit from
the days of a single-user mindset.  There's a reason for
NSUserDefaults, and Mac OS X apps should use them to comply with UI
guidelines and the users' expectations.  Besides, it's less work to do
it right.

-jcr

John C. Randolph    <<email_removed>>  (408) 974-8819
Sr. Cocoa Software Engineer,
Apple Worldwide Developer Relations
http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/index.html
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