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:

1. Under Adium’s preferences, select to display an icon in the menu bar
2. Navigate to Adium.app in the /Applications folder
3. Right click on the Adium.app icon and select “Show Package Contents”
4. Navigate into the “Contents” folder
5. Open “Info.plist” in TextEdit
6. Add the following as a new element just inside of the <dict> element:
   

   <key>LSUIElement</key>
   <true/>

7. Save “Info.plist”
8. 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.