Building Preference Pane or Standalone App

I'm updating a very old and abandoned Obj-C app and rewriting it in Swift.

At its most fundamental level, this update is to get at least the original functionality included in my new app, but I do have plans for more features that the original didn't offer. Originally the app was configured by just a System Preferences Preference Pane and had no GUI of its own. I'm curious if I should stick to that methodology or if I should build an actual app.

This is an app that will be running as a service in the background and will not need any UI to interact with beyond the configuration of its settings. What are the current best practices? Should I rewrite it as a more modern Preference Pane plug-in or should I build it more as maybe a menubar app that then allows me to access its preferences that way (as well as maybe turning the app as a whole on and off which the original version did not allow)?

This is an app that will be running as a service in the background

In a particular user context? Or do you want it to run as a daemon, that is, in the global context. To decide between the two, ask:

  • What will this service do if no GUI user is logged in?

  • And what will it do if multiple GUI users are logged in?

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Building Preference Pane or Standalone App
 
 
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