1. Plists can be saved either as XML or as Binary format. Both is supported by Apple’s Plist Editor so you can just try it yourself to save a plist as binary.
2. i can’t remember why i used the text-editor… probably because of the encoding.
3. true indeed
4. nice find!
5. i have actually no idea
6. nope, no idea here…

Karsten

1. plists ARE xml. I never saw any “binary” version of a plist file. So I don’t quite get what you mean.

2. If you have XCode installed — You also have the “PList Editor” which gives you easy UI for editing plists. Why bother to work directly on the XML text of it? Search and replace are available, Encoding is handled automatically…. why not use it

3. Even if you want to edit the plist text by yourself — XCode itself is a good choice, and it does handle file encodings too.

4. There are two distinct way I saw in Apple’s own templates, to put “Macros” in the template files. One is the «MACRONAME»
where you must use the templateInfo.plist to explicitly tell XCode to MacroExpand the file, but there is another way, using ___MACRONAME___ instead. (3 underscores before and after the Macro name). These macros are being parsed and expanded even if you do not specify the file’s name in the template’s templateInfo.plist. Apple even uses these macros in the File names in the template directory.

5. One big mystery is the list of Apple provided Macros (like PROJECTNAME) and their content when compiling a template. What is (to your best knowledge) this list?

6. There is a new “templateChooser.plist” which allowes creating simple GUI with popup menus and checkboxes, to allow the user to specify the exact kind of template or template-variation he wants. I managed to duplicate Apple’s own templateChooser.plist behaviors, but I don’t know what is POSSIBLE. Have you any ideas?

Thanks again, and feel free to e-mail me anytime.
Motti