User Application Support folder on OS X?

[Trevor DeVore]

On Feb 18, 2005, at 2:00 PM, Andre Garzia wrote:
>
> I don't understand the problem, ~/Library/Application Support/ will 
> always point to the current user app support folder, why can't you use 
> it? That folder will always be present, and will always be on the same 
> place... okay, specialFolderPath will not return this folder, but you 
> will probably have different routines for both mac and win32 when it 
> comes to finding where to store data, so you can make win32 report 
> whatever place you want and hard code ~/Library/application support/ 
> on the mac, can't you?

> There probably is someway to return that folder using 'defaults' or 
> 'scutil' shell commands but since you know the folder in the first 
> place, why bother finding some way to return it?

Is it the same for all languages running OS X?  I once hard coded a 
small portion of a path on Windows.  In Spanish one of the folders that 
I hardcoded was the name of the folder in Spanish.  Needless to say my 
path did not work on Spanish systems.  That made me sad.  I vowed never 
to hardcode a folder that the operating system provides an API to 
retrieve.

Now if OS X is different then windows in that the folder structure is 
always the same regardless of language then that might be different.  
But can a user move their application support folder?  Is it possible 
that the user support folder could be on a server in a networked 
environment?  I don't know the answers to these questions but I know it 
won't matter if I use the API call.


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com