Bitfever

Sometimes you have a application running wich you do not want to be shown in the Dock. In my instance it is HardwareGrowler a utility that shows changes of device configuration (IP, Cable Connection status, mounted volumes, etc.) via the Growl notifications. Very usefull!

But there was no option to disable the visibility of the Icon in the Dock. So did some research and it came up that the most easy way to do this is the following:

• Reveal the application bundle contents in the Finder (Ctrl-Click + Show package contents).
• Edit the file named Info.plist in a text Editor.
• If not present add an entry to this XML-File or change an existing entry till it reads:

• Touch the bundle according to this hint: touch /applications/HardwareGrowler.app
• Relaunch the app
• Notice the abstence of any icon in the Dock and the Cmd-Tab bar
• Enjoy!

Update: Since I get a lot of Google hits for this article I thing I should add some infos:

• All the keys in the Info.plist and what they do is explained here
• LSUIElement can do more. Details here
• Dockless is a tool that conveniently takes care of the editing for you.
• HardwareGrowler really should get an option for this. If I would be better at Cocoa I would do it, but I will use it as an exercise.
• CocoaDevCenter has a Wiki page dedicated to this topic