This chapter will walk us through the steps needed to create a System Preference pane. A System Preference, rather than being a standalone double-clickable App, is a plugin or bundle, that can be loaded by the System Preferences App to display our own system preference.
The System Preference that we implement in this chapter is going to use an NSTask object to run a command-line tool as a separate process from within the preference pane. While we will not go into the intricate details of how NSTask runs and communicates with external processes, it is a topic that you may wish to investigate further.
In this chapter, we shall learn the following:
Creating preference panes
The 64-bit transition and how it affects our preference pane
Creating a preference pane project in Xcode
Configuring a preference pane project in Xcode
Sudden termination
Customizing a bundle project to implement new behavior
Running command-line tools from a Cocoa program