The Invisible Interface: Stealing Prefs

In this installment of The Invisible Interface, we are going to look at stealing preferences. What is stealing preferences? Simply enough, it’s using the preferences of some other app instead of having your own for a particular feature. The point of this is to avoid having to provide a separate interface for settings when the user has already made their choices known somewhere else.

The key here is finding cases where your functionality is more centrally used somewhere else. I’m going to use Hazel as an example but hopefully these will illustrate the point well enough for you to look for where you can apply it yourself.

Spring-Loaded Folders

For those that don’t know, Finder has a feature called spring-loaded folders. What this does is when you drag a file over a folder, after a delay, it will flash and then open that folder so you can drill deeper. It allows you to navigate the folder tree without having to let go of the file you are dragging.

Hazel implements spring-loaded folders as well. It works when you want to move/copy rules in between folders. Hovering the dragged rule over a folder in the list on the left will cause the view to switch to the rules for the hovered-over folder allowing you to drag back into the rule list and place the rule where you want it. [On a side note, implementing this uncovered a bug in NSTableView (at least on Tiger; have not checked with Leopard) resulting in me doing my own implementation of NSTableView’s drag and drop.]

Under Finder’s “General” tab, you’ll see a checkbox and slider to configure these settings. Your first thought may be to provide a similar UI in your app. But why? Does the user really care about tweaking this for each app it appears in? It seems like whatever setting works in Finder will be fine wherever else it is used so why not just use Finder’s preference?

Commonly Used Folders

In Hazel, when you specify a destination folder for some actions (like move and copy), there is a pop-up of folders. You’ll notice that there’s a list of common folders at the end of the pop-up menu. If you look a bit closer, you may notice that these are the same folders in the sidebar of your Finder windows. Those folders are common destinations for files so it’s a good list for Hazel to use. By grabbing that list from Finder, Hazel avoids any sort of extra maintenance/interface for managing that list.

AppleScript Editor

In 2.2, Hazel introduced inline editing of scripts. You are provided with a mini-AppleScript editor right in Hazel’s rule interface. Now, there are potentially different things you can tweak to make the editor suit your needs, such as line wrapping, tab widths and whether to use the script assistant. But if you poke around Hazel’s UI, you’ll see that there’s no interface to set these. That’s because Hazel steals these preferences from Script Editor. If someone is serious enough about editing AppleScript that they care about these settings, there’s a good chance they have Script Editor installed and already set these preferences. By using its preferences, there is a consistency of user experience between the two editors.

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Of course, you can’t do this everywhere. It’s best suited when the functionality is primarily used elsewhere and you are echoing it in your own app. The apps Apple ships with the system are an easy mark since you can usually rely on them being installed and they tend to be the places where common functionality is defined. Overall, the result is a less tweaky and cluttered interface and a more seamless experience with the rest of the system.

Doing the Heist

You can grab other apps’ preferences using either CoreFoundation or Cocoa. With Cocoa, NSUserDefaults is your go-to guy. -persistentDomainForName: does what you want. Give it a bundle ID and in return, you get a dictionary of preferences. What would’ve made more sense is something like +userDefaultsForName: which would return an NSUserDefaults instance, but hey, it’s not like Apple is hiring me to do API design. With CoreFoundation, you can use CFPreferencesCopyAppValue() to pick individual preferences. Again, a bundle ID is needed.

And I can’t leave without placating the more pedantic among you that have to point out the potential dangers of doing this. Therefore, I must note that there is some risk in doing this as most apps do not document their preference settings and they can change at any time. Having default values of your own for these settings should minimize the risk, at least buying you time until you can re-work things to use the new schema. That said, if this is for some critical/primary functionality in your app, it might behoove you to have your own settings for it. As they say, invest only what you can afford to lose, or, to milk the stealing metaphor, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. And while we’re at it, just say “no” to drugs, kids.