Launchd Editor

After Tiger came out I heard about this new process that replaced cron, at, watchdog, init, startup items, and a variety of other things.

As I looked into launchd I discovered that it was a powerful program but that the power of it was lost in a horridly complicated property list file. While I know that I could make one if I wanted to, I also knew that a large number of people would not be able to or would have problems doing do. An even larger number of people would be excluded entirely because they simply don’t “get” property lists and don’t have Xcode installed and, thus, don’t have the Property List Editor.

Launchd Editor is a graphical editor for launchd’s property list files. It makes sure that the proper keys are of the proper values and lets you enter in whatever information you want in those keys. I shied away from validating the input too much so as to not prevent the more esoteric things from being possible, so it’s still useful to review the manual page for launchd.plist to make sure you’re using the values correctly.