...and then quits out of the launch process.
I'm running 10.10.1.
I really don't know, I am just guessing here. But the \rtf part makes me think of "rich text format". Are you 100% sure that you have saved the file as an ASCII text file, and not as a rich text file or something like that? Open a Terminal, go to the directory, and check the file type with "file":
Bitcoin$ file bitcoin.conf
bitcoin.conf: ASCII text
You, sir, are correct. Thanks for the guidance. For all other Newb Mac guys the solution is as follows...
The Mac OS text editor is setup to operate with rich text and if one changes the bitcoin file extension to .conf from .rtf it won't change the format of the content, thus generating the above reported error. Thus one must:
1. Set TextEdit for plain text in the New Document pane of TextEdit preferences AND...
2. Open the Save dialog, choose Customize Encoding List from the drop-down menu for Plain-Text Encoding, add Western (ASCII) as an option, and choose that option for saving the bitcoin.conf file in Users/
The bitcoin.conf file you create/edit with TextEdit should contain the (ASCII) text suggested by BookLover in the first post of https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=623868.new#new.