How to hide a dock item in Mac OS X
Follow these instructions to hide an app from showing in the dock while it’s running. This is for those apps that don’t provide you with a means to hide the dock item in the preferences. You shouldn’t do this to just any app you feel like it because it has some side effects. The main one being that you will not be able to pull up the menu bar at the top of the screen for it. Meaning you won’t be able to access the preferences or any other functionality that is exclusive to the menu bar. The other real loss is the app will not show up in the Command+Tab app switching menu.
So you’d probably only want to do this to simple apps that don’t require many modifications and/or apps that run in the background and just do their thing. It’s mostly dependent on whether or not you ever use the menu items such as the preferences. I think you get the idea by now.
The change is also entirely reversible simply by undoing and what you did. Meaning just remove the added text and save changes and you’re back to square one.
Here’s how -
Quit the application and show it in Finder. Right-click it and choose “Show Package Contents”.
In the package contents, go to Contents > Info.plist. Open this plist in a text editor like TextEdit. If you are trying to change an application which is restricted by permissions, you may have to change the files permissions so you can write to it. Get Info for the file and change it so you can write to the file.
Paste the following under the first <dict>. This will make sure the hack applies correctly. You could put it at the end of the file, before the closing <dict> but I have had problems putting it there.
<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
Save the changes and that’s it!
