Of all the "under the hood" components of Mac OS X, my personal favorite is preferences files. Why? For starters, they are important. They potentially affect every application you use, from the Finder ...

Safari crashes on launch. Mail quits when you try to send a message. What to do? Most savvy Mac users will delete the application’s preferences file, which stores changes made to the program’s default ...

Migration Assistant is a great tool if you want to transfer all your applications, settings, documents, and other files over, but if you want to start fresh it doesn't give you a lot to work with. Mac ...

The Preferences in Adobe Illustrator allow you to make changes that will fit your needs. There are default preferences that come with Illustrator; however, the user can make changes to the panel ...

With Lion, I'm seeing a lot of plist.lockfile in my Preferences folder. I'm assuming the "lockfile" business has to do with the new autosave stuff in Lion, but why would that apply to a preference ...

Editor’s Note: This article, published in our August 2008 issue, includes information on .Mac, which will be replaced by MobileMe in early July. Any instructions may change significantly. Most people ...

In this installment of our continuing series on preferences (.plist) files, we finally delve into the details of how to interpret and edit .plist files. I'll be primarily showing you how to do make ...