Hiding Apps in the Dock

[jacobkm]

Does anyone know how to keep certain runnings apps from showing in the Dock? I run XDarwin and DragThing all the time, and I'd love to keep thier icons from showing up in the Dock. It's got to be possible somehow; background services like iTunesHelper don't show up...

TIA,

Jacob

[tinb]

This works for several applications so maybe for DragThing as well:

- Locate Info.plist inside the application wrapper
- Open this with PropertyListEditor
- Select first line (Root)
- Click "New Child"
- Type "NSUIElement" (without "")
- Enter 1 (one!) as string value on the same line
- Save it!
- Restart application

Voila!


CU,

Robert

[j3f]

Thanks Robert!

Your directions worked well for Clock and DesktopCalendar, both of which have redundant and/or uselss dock icons. BTW, DesktopCalendar already has the NSUIElement key set to 0, so it was only necessary to change it to 1.

Jeff

[jacobkm]

Robert --

Yay! It works for XDarwin... that's cool.

But unfortunatly DragThing is not a package, so there's no way of getting at Info.plist that I can figure out. Can anyone think of another way?

(Really, that Dock prefs should have a list of files to hide when in the dock like DragThing has).

Jacob

[mervTormel]

jacobkm,

DragThing has a resource fork that you may be able to carefully twiddle with resEdit in OS9

let us know.

[jasonxz]

You will have to open DragThing in ResEdit or Resorcerer. Find the plist resource, open it, and just before the closing </dict> tag at the end, add:
<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

DragThing will no longer appear in the dock, but a few other interesting things happen; for instance, DragThing no longer appears in the force quit dialog, and, more importantly, you can no longer access DragThing's menu bar items. This latter behavior is odd, but I like that it blends more into the UI. You can still access the dock & layer prefs via the contextual menu.