Dockless Helper Apps on Leopard

The Last.fm client has a number of helper apps. These helper apps don’t link to QtGui so would normally not get a dock icon. However, since Leopard everything seems to get a dock icon by default if you put in the Contents/MacOS directory of your bundle.

There are two solutions that we found for this problem.

1. Bundlise the binary

   This is more packaging work and feels lame. You can cheat and prevent having to copy your shared libraries into the new bundle using symlinks, ie:

   $ path=helper.app/Contents/MacOS/ mkdir -p $path && cd $path
   $ ln -s ../../../helper .
   $ vim ../info.plist
   

2. A symlink from resources

   cd your.app/Contents/Resources/
   ln -s ../MacOS/yourapp .
   

   Launching the symlink will run the application in the background without a dock icon.

Any other solutions? Please write them below.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 19:13 and is filed under Last.fm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.