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Weblog:   Turf Battle: Dock vs. Menu Bar
Subject:   Hate the dock I does, gollum gollum
Date:   2003-12-31 12:16:01
From:   anonymous2
The dock is a poorly conceived piece of garbage that has no place in OS X as it currently exists.


First, I have four items in the dock that don't need to be there. They are utilities like SuitCase that are implemented as applications in OS X but were extensions in OS 9. The dock should have a filtering mechanism that allows the user to indicate which applications shouldn't appear in the dock.


Second, items appear in the dock based on their launching chronology and move up and down the dock as applications are launched and quit. Short of dragging an application to the dock so it appears there whether it is running or not, there is no way to pin an item to a specific location nor can we have items appear alphabetically.


Third, the dock takes up important real estate if placed on the top or bottom of the window. On 12" notebooks it isn't convenient to place the dock on the left or right. The only real solution is to auto hide the dock.


Please! Don't move the menu items to the dock. A much better thing to do would be to throw the dock away and try again.
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Showing messages 1 through 6 of 6.

  • LSUIElement
    2004-01-01 08:00:26  anonymous2 [View]

    If the Info.plist of an app has a property LSUIElement set to 1, then it does not appear in the dock or app switcher. I used that to make LaunchBar hide. It's quite useful. You can hide your SuitCase, etc. using the same method: Right-click (or Ctrl-Click) on the app in the Finder and select Show Package Contents. Navigate into the Contents folder, then open the Info.plist. If you have the Dev Tools installed, it will open in the Property List Editor, and you can simply change the LSUIElement to 1 (if it is there) or select the expanded Root entry and click Add Child to make a new entry for LSUIElement and set it to 1. If you don't have the Dev Tools, you'll have to manually edit the XML with any XML editor, or vi from xterm, etc.
    • LSUIElement
      2004-01-01 21:52:52  anonymous2 [View]

      I use an app called Drop Drawers, which shows it's icon on the doc. I tried all your suggestions, but could not get them to work. The app won't open in Property List Editor nor is there a "Show Package Contents" in the contextural menu.

      I contacted the Co. and they said that it's an OSX limitation that makes it almost imposible to hide certain App icons.

      Doesn't sound right to me, but i'm starting out in the development side. So what do I know.

    • LSUIElement
      2004-01-01 09:07:15  anonymous2 [View]

      In earlier versions of OS X there were some unhappy consequences of making an application faceless. I recall a few utilities (LaunchBar was one, if I remember properly) that offered a way to do it but warned it wasn't a good idea.) Perhaps this is why Apple hasn't made this configuration user easy?
      • LSUIElement
        2004-12-29 11:38:41  jjoonathan [View]

        Actually, this is a limitation of the tools they are using. They used code warrior, so the application is resourced-based and has no bundle. Therefore, the info.plist is either embedded (look for it in resedit), or not there. If they had used Xcode, it would be a proper bundle and all would be happy.
      • LSUIElement
        2004-12-29 11:36:38  jjoonathan [View]

        Actually, this is a limitation of the tools they are using. They used code warrior, so the application is resourced-based and has no bundle. Therefore, the info.plist is either embedded (look for it in resedit), or not there. If they had used Xcode, it would be a proper bundle and all would be happy.
  • Blame Suitcase
    2003-12-31 12:45:04  anonymous2 [View]

    Don't blame Apple for utilities appearing in the Dock that shouldn't. They can run as a faceless background app in Mac OS X if they wanted to, I've done that for ports of projects that used to be Control Panels/Extensions.
Showing messages 1 through 6 of 6.