Remove the Hardware Growler Icon from the Dock
For anybody who’s using Growl, specifically the Hardware Growler addition, one thing you might be a tad irritated by is the presence of the program’s Dock icon.
Hardware Growler doesn’t actually attach itself to Growl as a service and needs to be running all the time that you wish to receive notifications from it. This also means that it takes up room in your Mac OS X dock, which is a crowded area for many users. To remove the icon when the program is running:
- If Hardware Growler is running, close it down
- Right click ‘Hardware Growler’ in the Applications folder and click ‘Show Package Contents’
- Under ‘Contents’, open ‘Info.plist’ in TextWrangler or TextEdit
- At the end of the file (before the </dict> & </plist> keys) add the following:
- Save, exit your text editor and relaunch Hardware Growler, now 100% icon free
<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
I’m thinking of fixing this in my forked version of growl (visible at https://bitbucket.org/pmetzger/growl/ with binaries at https://bitbucket.org/pmetzger/growl/downloads ) — do you think I should make it a configuration option?
Hi Perry, I’ll check out your fork when I’m back at my desk.
So you’re asking if hiding the Hardware Growler icon should be a config option? Actually, I think it shouldn’t even be an option – these ‘plugin’ type extras for Growl should work in the same way as web browser plugins; you wouldn’t expect the Flash Player to bounce in your dock every time it loads in Safari, and I don’t see why Hardware Growler etc… should either.
Look forward to seeing your Growl mod.