What elements should I include in a Mac Preferences Panel?

I have a question about my Mac program's preferences window. I have an application with a CoreData-based back end. My program includes a feature that allows users to switch out the database for a different one. I do not expect users to do this very often—perhaps once or twice a year.

Now, many of the options that users can tweak are stored in the database. These options need to be configured once every time that a new database is used, because they are specific to the database itself.

The Apple Human Interface Guidelines on Preferences state this:

As much as possible, ensure that users rarely need to reset preferences. Ideally, preferences include settings that users might want to change only once. If there are settings users might want to change every time they open your app, or every time they perform a certain task, don’t put these settings in preferences. Instead, you could use a menu item or a control in a panel to gives u开发者_Go百科ser modeless access to these settings.

My question is this: Are my database-level settings valid candidates for the preferences window? Does "once or twice a year" count as "rarely"? If not, are there any downsides to creating a second panel (with many panes that are controlled by an NSToolbar) that looks just like a preferences panel but is accessed from a different menu item ("Database Preferences" for example)?

I see database-level settings all the time under Preferences in various apps (1Password and MacJournal come to mind). Thus, Preferences often contains both database-level settings and "actual" preferences that go in a plist file. The former (the data-base level settings) is absolutely crucial, being the actual data. The latter (the plist file) isn't as important and losing this data shouldn't cause too much harm, as it's just simple settings the user can easily get back to manually.

On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with separating the two, especially if your app is a multi-window (document-based) app that can have many databases open at once.

But I do think it's simplest to just put it all into the Preferences. That's what you probably should do, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

To answer some of your questions directly:

1. Are my database-level settings valid candidates for the preferences window? — Yeah, I think they are. And many apps (such as 1Password and MacJournal) do this too.
2. Does "once or twice a year" count as "rarely"? — Yeah.
3. Are there any downsides to creating a second panel? — If you have a good reason to separate the two, I see nothing wrong with it.

Just my two cents.