PlistChecker 1.5.1 review

After spending too many hours wondering why my document icons weren't showing up under Mac OS X, and finally figuring out that it was caused by a typo in my 'plst' resource, I wrote this utility to help other Mac OS X programmers.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 139K Developer: James W. Walker Price: $0.00 Updated: 06 Jan 2007

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After spending too many hours wondering why my document icons weren't showing up under Mac OS X, and finally figuring out that it was caused by a typo in my 'plst' resource, I wrote this utility to help other Mac OS X programmers.

Drag a packaged application, or a single-fork application containing a 'plst' resource, or an Info.plist file and drop it on PlistChecker. PlistChecker displays a report listing any problems it found.

What PListChecker does:
• Verifies the UTF-8 encoding.
• Reports any XML/plist parsing errors.
• Reports any undocumented top-level keys.
• Checks the types of the values for most documented keys, and keys within the CFBundleDocumentTypes array.
• Reports keys recommended by TN 2013 that are missing from the plist.

These checks are based on my understanding of what a plist should look like, and should not be taken as gospel. PListChecker does not examine InfoPlist.strings files. It requires Mac OS 9.0 or later.

What's New:
There is now a preference dialog with a "verbose" option. With this unchecked, you get either only errors and warnings, or the text "** No problems found! **".
Application names longer than 31 characters or containing Unicode characters are now displayed correctly.
The window title now shows the version number after the application name.
If there is no problem with the character encoding, the report does not mention it.
The Cut, Clear, and Paste menu commands are disabled, since the report text is read-only.
There is a Window menu.
The menu item "About PListChecker" is not followed by an ellipsis.