No technical expert advice can be found here ;)

With OS X 10.2 Apple introduced a more space-efficient binary plist-format. With OS X 10.4 this new binary format became the default format. The underlaying format is a simple XML-format (introduced with OS X 10.0), which was easy to read and parse from Java.

The new format must be parsed in a special way: either by using Apple’s Property List Editor, or by using the Apache Commons Configuration (which API is supporting the Property List format). In addition there is a new project of Daniel Dreibrodt, who is maintaining a JAVA project to read the binary plist format. It is licenced under GPL3 and can be found at:

http://code.google.com/p/plist/

Update: There is a new project on sourceforge that should be able to read and write the .plist-format. Up to now I haven’t tested it, but I want to provide the link here too: Property List Library