Adding a Preferences UI

Sparkle 2

These instructions below are for adding preferences in a Cocoa nib and assume you have a Preferences nib with its File's Owner being set to your Preferences controller class (e.g, a NSWindowController subclass). The controller class should have an updater property set to your application’s SPUUpdater, which may be passed from your application’s delegate.

Enable automatic checking

  • Drag a check button from the Library to your document.
  • Set the title to something like “Automatically check for updates”.
  • Select the check button, and under the Bindings tab, select Value.
  • Check the Bind to: check button, choose File's Owner from the popup, and set the Model Key Path to updater.automaticallyChecksForUpdates.

Update check interval

  • Drag a popup button from the Library to your document.
  • Set the titles of the menu items to e.g. “Hourly”, “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Monthly”.
  • Set the tags of the menu items to the corresponding times in seconds, e.g. 3600, 86400, 604800, 2629800.
  • Select the popup button, and under the Bindings tab, select Selected Tag.
  • Check the Bind to: check button, choose File's Owner from the popup, and set the Model Key Path to updater.updateCheckInterval.
  • Select Enabled, check the Bind to: check button, choose File's Owner from the popup, and set the Model Key Path to updater.automaticallyChecksForUpdates.

Other preferences

Follow directions similar to Enable automatic checking to bind a check button to updater.sendsSystemProfile or updater.automaticallyDownloadsUpdates. See customization for details on the available keys.

Sparkle 1

These instructions below are for adding preferences in a Cocoa nib and assume you have a Preferences nib with its File's Owner being set to your Preferences controller class (e.g, a NSWindowController subclass). The controller class should have an updater property set to your application’s SUUpdater, which may be passed from your application’s delegate.

Enable automatic checking

  • Drag a check button from the Library to your document.
  • Set the title to something like “Automatically check for updates”.
  • Select the check button, and under the Bindings tab, select Value.
  • Check the Bind to: check button, choose File's Owner from the popup, and set the Model Key Path to updater.automaticallyChecksForUpdates.

Update check interval

  • Drag a popup button from the Library to your document.
  • Set the titles of the menu items to e.g. “Hourly”, “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Monthly”.
  • Set the tags of the menu items to the corresponding times in seconds, e.g. 3600, 86400, 604800, 2629800.
  • Select the popup button, and under the Bindings tab, select Selected Tag.
  • Check the Bind to: check button, choose File's Owner from the popup, and set the Model Key Path to updater.updateCheckInterval.
  • Select Enabled, check the Bind to: check button, choose File's Owner from the popup, and set the Model Key Path to updater.automaticallyChecksForUpdates.

Other preferences

Follow directions similar to Enable automatic checking. to bind a check button to sendsSystemProfile or automaticallyDownloadsUpdates. See customization for details on the available keys.

Preferences for non-app bundles

These directions do not work for non-app bundles, as the updater you add to the nib will be the sharedUpdater for the application bundle. To be able to bind to the updater for your bundle, you can add the following accessor to your preferences controller (the owner of the nib):

- (SUUpdater *)updater {
    return [SUUpdater updaterForBundle:[NSBundle bundleForClass:[self class]]];
}

Then just bind the controls to the File’s Owner, and start the Model Key Path with updater., e.g. updater.automaticallyChecksForUpdates.

Watch out for preference caching

macOS caches plist files in ~/Library/Preferences, so don’t edit them directly. If you want to tweak these files for testing (e.g. change last update check date), use the defaults command.