The Info.plist File
Metainformation about your project, which you usually define through Project Builder’s Project → Edit Active Target (Option-
-E) dialog, is stored in a special
Info.plist
file, which Project Builder writes to
the application’s /Contents
folder upon building. Every Bundle-style application on your system
(that is, every Cocoa application and every Bundle-style Carbon or
Java application as well) has one of these files, which are, like all
.plist
files, in Property List XML format
(described in Chapter 22).
Taken together, all the
Application/
Application.app
/Contents/Info.plist
files installed in all the filesystem’s domain-level
Application
folders (see Section 9.2.1) compose a registry of all the applications
available to the machine. This lets the system build a database of
application information, which lets the Finder assign the correct
Kind
to application-specific files under its List
view and Info windows, the defaults program pair
preference domains to applications (as Chapter 22
describes), and more. The application itself can also pull
information from this file in order to help build its
About dialog, for example, as well as know what
file format its own documents use.
A related file,
version.plist
, can
exist in the same directory as Info.plist
. As its name suggests, it contains information about the applications’ version and build numbers, as well ...
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