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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...