Semi transparent icons for hidden apps
Ivan | Fri, 2005-07-29 07:44Not sure how many of you know about this hidden feature of Mac OS X. (Sorry for the forced pun ;)
You can have a visual feedback in your dock about which applications are in the hidden state. They can become semi transparent in the Dock like the Mail.app and iTunes in the example above. Not sure why Apple doesn't enable this feature by default but here is how to get the functionality. Type this into Terminal:defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true
then restart the Dock by typing:killall Dock
To return to normal, you guessed right - replace true with false in the command and kill the Dock again.
If you missed it, here you can read about the somewhat related application switcher hidden features and another post about how to replace the cartoonish dock poof with a macho explosion.
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There a $8 application available too, transparent Dock.
http://www.freerangemac.com/TransparentDock2.html
Does that and much more. Plus saves dock configurations as themes. Rocks!
Strange...I've always thought that was turned on by default. I've always seen it on my mac, at least.
Ankit Soni, the post was actually in reference to the icons being transparent, not the dock itself. FYI ;)
You can also do this with TinkerTool, it's a neat app...
I can't really seem to get it to work, I just pasted it into the terminal but it doesn't show any sign of working, it might be because I'm not using the standard icons? (running tiger)
Did you restart the Dock?
Yes, even tried logging off and on again, as this is a neato trick I'd like to have running on my mac.
I even tried running in binary :) defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden 1 then killall Dock, that makes the dock restart but still no go, using candybar and somatic icons, not sure if that should matter any though.
Try using tinkertool.
Ah, got it to work now, seems it was just my own stupidity that held me back. Apparently I did't know that one could minimize programs on the mac, I usually just closed the main window in stead.
One lives and learns :)
Thanks for your help !
Oynx Is a great FREE app that can do that appearance change and so much awesomeness stuff. And it's not a preference pane like tinkertool, it's a real app :) it rox my sox
from macupdate:
'Onyx is a utility for maintenance, optimization, and personalization for Mac OS X. It also makes it possible to configure certain hidden parameters of Finder and the Dock and to remove certain files such as cache files and performs maintenance routines, many other functions."
Can I add the same functionality to Command + Tab?
In the above example, can you tell which application is hidden?
Is this a tricky question? The girl is hidden for sure. :)
Seriously, I don't know, it would be nice. You can however hide things in application switcher and do many more.