To provide a better experience for users, iOS and Mac OS X rely on the presence of special meta information in each application or bundle. This meta information is used in many different ways. Some of it is displayed to the user, some of it is used internally by the system to identify your application and the document types it supports, and some of it is used by the system frameworks to facilitate the launch of applications. The way an application provides its meta information to the system is through the use of a special file called an information property list file.
Property lists are a way of structuring arbitrary data and accessing it at runtime. An information property list is a specialized type of property list that contains configuration data for a bundle. The keys and values in the file describe the various behaviors and configuration options you want applied to your bundle. Xcode typically creates an information property list file for any bundle-based projects automatically and configures an initial set of keys and values with appropriate default values. You can edit the file, however, to add any keys and values that are appropriate for your project or change the default values of existing keys.
This document describes the keys (and corresponding values) that you can include in an information property list file. This document also includes an overview of information property list files to help you understand their importance and to provide tips on how to configure them.
This document contains the following articles:
“About Information Property List Files” provides an overview of information property list files and how you configure them.
“Core Foundation Keys” describes the keys that provide basic information about the bundle configuration.
“Launch Services Keys” describes the keys used by Launch Services to obtain information about a bundle.
“Cocoa Keys” describes the keys supported by Cocoa and Cocoa Touch applications.
“Mac OS X Keys” describes keys supported by Mac OS X bundles.
“UIKit Keys” describes the keys specific to iOS applications.
For more information about generic property lists, including how they are structured and how you use them, see Property List Programming Guide.
Some information property list keys use Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs) to refer to data of different types. For an introduction to UTIs and how they are specified, see Uniform Type Identifiers Overview.
Last updated: 2010-07-08