Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. To declare an application to be a background application, use Xcode to open the application's bundle Info.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. You should also use this key if your application uses higher-level frameworks that connect to the window server, but are not intended to be visible to users.Īs background applications are never shown in the macOS menu bar, you should be launch/terminate the application with another GUI application. You can use this key to create faceless background applications. If background application key exists and is set to YES, Launch Services runs the application in the background only.

set the UIElement property's value to True Ī background only application runs only in the background.

add a property UIElement (or 'Application is agent').

To declare an application to be an agent application, use Xcode to open the application's bundle ist file: Similarly, the Dock and Login Window are also two applications that run as agents.

A click on a window belonging to an agent application brings that application forward to handle events.Īgents are often shown in the macOS menu bar, in which case the agent application should provide a StatusBar (TTrayIcon) user interface and hotkeys if it needs a menu-like user interface.įor example, startlazarus is an agent application, launched by the Lazarus IDE when rebuilt. Although they typically run as background applications, they can come to the foreground to present a user interface if desired. plist file, Launch Services runs the application as an agent. If the agent key exists and is set to YES in the application's. These two application categories and their attributes are explained below.Īgent applications do not appear in the Dock or in the Force Quit window but they are visible to utilities like Activity Monitor, Unix command-line tools (eg top), as well as macOS API functions. While there is no way to hide an application from the Dock at runtime, this can be done at design-time if the application declares itself to be an agent or a background application.

How to hide mac dock icons