Preference panes are really just slimmed-down Mac OS X applications,
and as such, can be installed from a source disk (or a freshly
downloaded disk image) to your local hard drive with a simple
drag-and-drop procedure (see Chapter 5). They
can even be launched like other applications; double-clicking a
.prefPane file’s icon while in
the Finder causes it to open within System Preferences (launching that
application first, if it wasn’t already running).
However, the System Preferences application won’t
display preference panes’ icons as part of its main
view (Figure 4-1) unless you add them into one of
the filesystem’s Library folders.
Placing a .prefPane
file in the
~/Library/PreferencePanes folder located within
your own Home folder causes it to appear listed among the System
Preferences’ pane icons for you alone. If you want
to let all users of the machine use the pane (and you have admin
privileges), you can place it in
/Library/PreferencePanes. (Note that this shares
only the interface; unless the pane explicitly sets systemwide
preferences, it will read from and write to only the appropriate
preference file within the /Library folder of
any user who uses it.)
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