Mac OS X preferences -were- human-readable (and editable), but that's not what makes the NSUserDefaults API so handy. What makes NSUserDefaults handy is the support for varying default domains (network, system, user) and dead-simple serialization of Objective-C basic types (strings, ints, dictionaries, arrays).
Additionally, Apple switched to a binary file format to improve performance in 10.5, which may be converted to/from the text format, or edited directly using the property list editor.
There's also nothing stopping a software author from documenting their settings file keys, and some do. However, most of the settings options you do see listed on that site are undocumented because they are unsupported.
I one really wants to get into the settings of Mac OsX, and have a marvellous scheme based tool, which securely performs requests, and are free as well :-)
Then Clix is the ultimate choice in my humble opinion.
It is published under the assumption that it is better to teach a man to fish.
The software can be found here:
[http://www.versiontracker.com/users/rixstep]
And their site here : [http://rixstep.com/]
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] threadhttp://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Reference/Fou...
Oh... It wouldn't
Additionally, Apple switched to a binary file format to improve performance in 10.5, which may be converted to/from the text format, or edited directly using the property list editor.
There's also nothing stopping a software author from documenting their settings file keys, and some do. However, most of the settings options you do see listed on that site are undocumented because they are unsupported.
go on, vote me down