OS X Stickies

[StarBuck]

Ok under Mac OS 8.x 9.x your stickies are held in your preference folder in your system folder, for the life of me I cannot see where the data files are kept in Mac OS X

Does anyone have any ideas?

Starbuck

[ericmurphy]

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.stickies.plist

(Which, if you think about it, is basically the same place under OS X as it is under OS 9.)

If you double-click on this file, you'll launch Apple's Property List editor. It's not extremely intuitive how to use it, but if you poke around a bit, you should be able to figure it out.

A good place to get familiar with under OS X is the ~/Library folder (I'm assuming you know that ~/ is Unix-speak for "home directory," and that ~/Library is the "Library" folder in your home directory). The "Preferences" folder in your "Library" folder is basically the same as the "Preferences" folder under OS 9. The "Library" folder serves much the same function as the "System Folder" does under OS 9.

[StarBuck]

Ok that is where I first checked on my my but I have no file on my hard drive called stickies apart from the application its self.

I checked the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.stickies.plist path and also the root preference folder ?

Weird

[ericmurphy]

Hmm...have you used Stickies yet? (I know, that's probably a stupid question...) But I'm assuming Stickies doesn't actually create its preference file until you run it and save a sticky note.

This gives me an idea, though...it's always bothered me how, if you don't already have a note created in Stickies, it either creates a blank note when you launch it, or you get that cluster of notes telling you how great Stickies is, which would be fine if they appeared ONLY the first time you ran Stickies, but when seem to appear whenever Stickies is launched and there are no pre-existing notes. I'll have to check into that...maybe you can alter that behavior by editing the stickies.plist file.

[StarBuck]

OK

Stickies is a Cocoa application could the data file be located in the application bundle?

I think that would make sense

I have used stickies on both my laptop and desktop mac. The laptop has a plist file but the desktop does not.

I have deleted the the standard stickies on my desktop, I still have the default notes on my laptop. I'm about to delete them.

[ericmurphy]

You're SURE there's no file called com.apple.Stickies.plist in your ~/Library/Preferences folder? (Just to reiterate, and apologies if I'm insulting your intelligence, but we are talking the Preferences folder in your Library folder in your Home directory).

It's certainly not impossible that Stickies could keep its data files in the application bundle, but it seems at least a bit odd that Stickies on my system would have a data file in the Preferences folder (it's 547 bytes, and its modification date looks about right in terms of when I last used Stickies), but yours doesn't. And I'm pretty sure this has been Stickies' behavior at least since the public beta.

This is a long shot, but could there be a permissions problem with either the ~/Library folder or the Preferences folder? You might want to make sure that you have read/write/execute privileges for both folders...

Just as an experiment, you might try copying the Stickies.plist file from your laptop to your desktop computer, just to see what happens.

[StarBuck]

ok if you delete com.stickies.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.stickies.plist

you will not lose your notes in stickies.

I just done that on my laptop logged in as root and deleted the file made no change.

100% sure I have no file called com.apple.stickies.plist on my desktop or any file called stickies only the application I have logged in as root to check for invisibles.

[ericmurphy]

I'll have to hunt around on my system some more when I get home. Unfortunately, I'm at work right now, and forced (at gunpoint) to use an NT box. I've been seeing what files are installed in my home directory by ftp-ing there, and I suppose I could do some searching for filenames by ssh-ing in and running grep or locate, but I think I'll wait until the machine in question is sitting in front of me.

I'll let you know if I come up with anything.

Just out of curiosity...why are you trying to find these data files? Just curiosity, or did you lose data somehow...?