Reloading preferences in Mac OS X El Capitan gotcha solved

[Martin Koob]

Other LiveCoders already probably know this but I thought in case someone doesn't it may save them some time.

I use the GLX framework which has functions for working with the preferences .plist file saved in the ~/Library/Preferences directory. I was trying to resolve an issue with saving a .plist file for my app on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. With older versions of Mac OS X I would quit the app, remove the .plist file from ~/Library/Preferences reopen the app and Robert is one of your parents' brother. It was not working for me and I thought is was something I was doing wrong in my application resulting in the preferences not being saved properly.

After some googling I discovered that the preferences are cached in versions of Mac OS X since Mavericks, so, in spite of removing the .plist and relaunching the app, the app could still be using the old prefs.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?s ... 8042828630

Reading through this I there were a number of suggestions for clearing the cache of the prefs: restarting the Mac, but that was time consuming; logging out of the user account and back in, but I found that did not clear the cached prefs for me.

I found that using the 'defaults read' terminal command solution suggested in the article linked above was the best way for me to reset the prefs.

Code: Select all

defaults read /Users/martinkoob/Library/Preferences/com.mycompany.myapp.plist

If there is no com.mycompany.myapp.plist file the prefs are cleared. If you have copied a new com.mycompany.myapp.plist file it will load the values in that file as the apps preferences.

Knowing that would have saved a lot of time. Hope this post can save someone else some time.

Martin Koob