Run the GUI process on Mac OS X without a dock icon

Question

I have an application that usually works with a standard GUI. However, for some lengthy tasks, it starts additional processes of the same application, which run in "script" mode, where I control it from the parent process. Everything works fine, except that for each child process I get another dock icon that appears for a second or two and then disappears.

Is there a way to launch the application sometimes without the application icon appearing on the dock? I cannot edit the info.plist file or anything, because usually I want a dock icon. The parameter must be set by changing the property in the process or through a command line parameter. I have full control over the source code of the application. It is written in C ++ (Qt), but the solutions intended for the Cocoa native library are fine.

If I put this code in a separate application, it will cause serious duplication, so I would prefer to keep it as it is. I cannot run lengthy tasks in the background thread because they do what needs to be done in the GUI thread. (In Qt, you cannot reliably use fonts, pixmaps, or display SVG content on a QGraphicsScene in the background stream.)

Any solutions?

Answer 1

Motivated here , you can do:

[NSApp setActivationPolicy: NSApplicationActivationPolicyAccessory]; 

or

 [NSApp setActivationPolicy: NSApplicationActivationPolicyProhibited]; 

This should hide the dock icon. See here for some documentation on NSApplicationActivationPolicy .

In Python, the code to hide the dock icon:

 # https://stackoverflow.com/a/9220857/133374 import AppKit # https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/AppKit/Reference/NSRunningApplication_Class/Reference/Reference.html NSApplicationActivationPolicyRegular = 0 NSApplicationActivationPolicyAccessory = 1 NSApplicationActivationPolicyProhibited = 2 AppKit.NSApp.setActivationPolicy_(NSApplicationActivationPolicyProhibited) 

See also the corresponding question "How to hide the dock icon . "

---

If you want to avoid the dock icon at the beginning, you can do this:

 import AppKit info = AppKit.NSBundle.mainBundle().infoDictionary() info["LSBackgroundOnly"] = "1" 

Answer 2

 import AppKit info = AppKit.NSBundle.mainBundle().infoDictionary() info["LSBackgroundOnly"] = "1" 

This code works for my non-GUI background python script.