When I installed Namely (a simple application launcher), I decided to find the way of solving something that, despite not being a problem, it has always been annoying (at least for me).

I’m talking about all those running applications that most of the times we don’t need to be present in our dock, many of them set to be launched with system startup or even those with keyboard shortcuts.

Well, there is a solution for this, and actually, quite simple

Using a terminal, we need to locate the Info.plist file inside the application we want to “hide”. It will be inside the application folder in “Contents”. I decided to edit the file as super-user just to avoid troubles with permissions..

whitey:~ borja$ cd /Applications/Namely.app/Contents/
whitey:Contents borja$ sudo vi Info.plist

And here, inside the <dict> tag, along with the other key-value pairs, we just have to add another one saying:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<true/>

That’s it. Save the file, start the application and now its icon shouldn’t appear in the dock.

Obviously, these things always have collateral effects: the top menu of the application won’t be shown, we won’t be able to access the application using ⌘+Tab, … and I guess that there may be other things, but for simple applications such as Namely, I found this trick very useful

Perhaps one of the most desirable improvements on Mac OS, and you’ll notice it better if you are used to the Linux world, is the way it manages your installed software.

Apart from their own software (Apple’s software), up until now you could only trust those ‘Update available’ dialogs of your third-party applications. But even having that, it was your job downloading the new version and replacing the old one. In moments like that is when you miss the repository system and the apt-get update && apt-get upgrade that I meant before with that Linux world.

And I’ve said was because now there are alternatives to automate a bit that process, and make it quite simple. I know MacUpdate Desktop for a while ago now, a paid solution ($20/year), that apparently works quite well (you can try it for free for 10 days). It checks your installed software and using the large application database from MacUpdate, you can download and automatically update your obsolete versions.

It’s the closest thing to the repository system that I’ve found, and even though its price is really low considering the time and work you will save, I have recently found a similar software, but this time under a free license: AppFresh.

The main idea behind it is the same: it will check your applications (and plugins, widgets, and so on) that we’ve installed and using the information from osx.iusethis.com, will let us keep our Mac OS X up to date.

As they warn in their website, it’s still under development, what we call a beta version, so we should consider it when using it.

From what I’ve been testing so far, I could say that it works pretty well. Perhaps the process is a little bit less automated than with MacUpdate Desktop, but we should remember that we are talking about a free alternative

It may no longer be free once they achieve their first stable version, so I guess that you should take advantage of it now that it’s free. Now there’s no excuse to have your Mac OS X outdated

Official webpage | AppFresh