Hiding Programs While They Run

Key Apple-H

That kind of thing?

 

Which is what Apple-H does...

 

Hit the red button next to the yellow and green ones. This does not quit the program like windows but clears the desktop of that window. The program is still running.

Or like Blue said and Apple H.

 

Or while you have the application open, hold option and click on the desktop or finder. The active app disappears, but dosent shut down.

 

Hold down the button that looks like a circle with a vertical line through it. It should solve your problems.

Just kidding by the way, if you want to scan through the apps that are running hit apple-tab.

Cheers.

 

clarification

i think what he's asking is if you can have a prgm open

say Stattoo or Aqusition or some program that you don't really want to "use" at the moment
and make it completey 'disappear'

ie when u hit Cmd + Tab it doesn't appear in the listings
so MORE hidden than just Cmd + H

ditto that it doesn't appear in the DOCK

kinda like Konfabulator- it is Running- but i don't see it in the dock nor when i switch apps is it an option...

ideas?

 

You can also go up to a program and choose Hide Others in the Application Name menu under... ser... wait its just on there. If I was on my Mac, I could take a Grab of it.

 

Could you explain a bit more why you are asking this? apple-H is certainly reasonable enough, unless you're trying to hide something from someone else? Just guessing here.

You could create a separate user account, and enable fast user switching. That would hide everything that user is running.

However, Apple-H is good enough, and you can follow these instructions at O'Reilly for making the Dock icon for Apple-H'd apps transparent for convenience.

 

Dang I'll have to try that, thanks for the great tip!

 

You mean like a background app, right? Where you don't see it appear but it IS running.

That is determined by the people who make the application, BTW.

 

A service on a Mac is much different than on a Windows box. A service on a Mac allows you to take a screenshot with Grab instead of Command+Shift+3 in Cocoa applications, allows you to send a file to a Bluetooth device, search Google for the selected text, etc.

Services on Windows are things that hog CPU time

 

Right-click on the app in the dock you get a pop-up menu and one of the choices is to Hide Program. You can do it with a single-click as well by click-hold the selection until the menu appears. The easier way would be to Command-tab to the app and then while holding down the command key, press H to hide the app. Not all programs hide by pressing Command+H, such as Photoshop and After Effects.

 

Right click, lol, IF you have a right click mouse (I do, bc I don't have an apple original one). Just thought I'd not that, to right click you hold command and click it.

 

Perhaps this will help...

Hello! This is my first post at MacRumors.com, so I'm hoping I get this right, and don't clown myself...

At any rate, it sounds like this is what you want to do....

I have to run a program to access my on-campus mail account, and registrations systems, while off campus called VPNClient. The thing is, once it's connected, I want it out of my way, and more importantly, out of my dock, where it's just a waste of space (and on a 15" studio display, dock real estate is a big deal)... so here's two possible solutions.

1. There's a program called "Dockless" that launches, and you can select the programs which you wish to launch without a dock icon showing up. or, if you're feeling a little more adventurous...

2. Open up the applications folder, right click on the naughty dock-space stealing application, and right-click (option-click) on it, and select "Show Package Contents", and then navigate to "Contents", and finally to the info.plist file. Click on that to launch it in some form of a text editor (BBEdit, etc). Then, at the bottom, paste these two lines of code:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

- or -

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

I'm not sure exactly what these things mean, but it seems to do the trick. I have had more luck with the first one, though. You may have to log out, or shut down before these changes take effect. Also, if you ever want the dock icon to appear again (don't know why, really) then just change the 1 back to a 0, or delete the lines of code, alltogether.

One big draw back is that you will have to minimize the window to get it out of sight on the desktop, or if you use a program called WindowShade X, you can minimize it as a tiny little icon on your desktop. It rocks.

The other drawback is that while the program is loaded, the menu bar options are gone, as long as the dock icon is hidden. So you can't change preferences, or anything that goes on in the menu bar (unless you do a key command, possibly?!?). So set the program up the way you want, plop in the code, or run Dockless, and your dock woes will be eliminated.

Have a good day. Hope this helps.