[iphone sdk] best place for preference init

Question

I'm following the iPhone sample Prefs app. It does all the prefs init in applicationDidFinishLaunching.
However, I'm finding in my own app that this isn't cutting it. I have view controllers that are also concurrently getting cranked up and trying to use the preferences that may not have been fully loaded into variables yet for everyone to use.
Where else can I put the pref init code to make sure it completes before anything else? Should I stick it in my main.m? The only other option is for every little bit of code that uses preferences to do a check and wait. Just curious what best practices are in this case.
Thanks

Answer 1

If you are just setting up NSUserDefaults, you can do it initialize. here's a snippet from the apple example metronome /Classes/MetronomeAppDelegate.m
// +initialize is invoked before the class receives any other messages, so it
// is a good place to set up application defaults
+ (void)initialize {
if ([self class] == [MetronomeAppDelegate class]) {
// Register a default value for the time signature.
// This will be used if the user hasn't already specified a preferred time signature.
NSNumber *defaultTimeSignature = [NSNumber numberWithInt:TimeSignatureFourFour];
NSDictionary *resourceDict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:defaultTimeSignature forKey:MetronomeTimeSignatureKey];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:resourceDict];
Some things won't be available at that point but for the setup it's a pretty good place.