A recent convert to the Mac, I quickly searched for the equivalent of Trillian and landed on Adium for IM. It’s solid software that does just what I need – connect to YIM, MSN, AIM and Jabber.
I’ve never really liked requirement of dock icon for Adium, but with the recent addition of contact list access from the menu bar, I actively want to get rid of it. I find myself accidentally clicking on the dock icon to view contacts when I’d really rather use the menu bar just cuz there is this green buck smiling at me.
Today I was messing around with Growl setup and found instructions for removing a dock icon from an app. It turns out that this is a global OS setting that can be applied to Adium as well.
Here’s the instructions:
- Under Adium’s preferences, select to display an icon in the menu bar
- Navigate to Adium.app in the /Applications folder
- Right click on the Adium.app icon and select “Show Package Contents”
- Navigate into the “Contents” folder
- Open “Info.plist” in TextEdit
- Add the following as a new element just inside of the <dict> element:
<key>LSUIElement</key>
<true/> - Save “Info.plist”
- Relaunch Adium and you won’t see the dock icon !!
![]()
Note that the major downside is the lack of access to the standard Adium menus. If you need to get into the menus, then revert the above changes. This is a known feature request.
UPDATE: I just upgraded to Adium 1.2.2 and this hack broke. The previous build supported the </true> syntax, which thinking about it, should be invalid XML. In the current version, you need to use <true/>. I fixed the text and screenshot above.


Thanx!
Nice … thanks!
Hey I love this thing and have used it for long. But now on the new Adium they have changed the “Info.plist”, so now this will not work! any new solution?
Thanx/
J
it does work, but with relaunching the application, it keeps continuing asking the password for the different accounts. very strange…
This is a nice hack, but yeah, Adium does keep asking for the account password. I guess that due to the modification, its cryptographic signature is invalid and therefore it does not get access to the keychain. I know no way around this, so maybe we need app level support to remove the dock icon after all.