4 February 2007 - 10:49Making your Mac app ‘Dockless’.

Sometimes you just don’t want a specific application on your mac to be showing in your Dock. One that’s been bugging me for the last week or so is the app provided by IPEVO for their Skype USB phone. The app is good - it connects with Skype as you would expect, but it has to be running the whole time for the damn thing to work, which means it shows up when you hit Command-Tab to cycle between running programs, and is available in the Dock too.

Considering I don’t need to change the settings in this program pretty much ever, this is fairly pointless. However, a quick bit of googling got me to the following hack - break the app open by right clicking on it then selecting ‘Show Package Contents’, navigate to the Info.plist file and open it in your preferred text editor. Then add the following lines at the end of the keys and strings:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

And Bob’s your Uncle. One thing to bear in mind - this also removes any way of selecting the application when open, other than double clicking it in the finder, and removes any menus for that app when in focus. As such it’s best to keep a backup copy hanging around so that you can open that, make any changes to preferences etc as need be, close it and reopen the hacked version for day to day use.

NB - don’t blame me if this screws anything up.