[Pythonmac-SIG] Banishing MacPython Dock Icon

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Sat Feb 26 20:25:28 CET 2005


On Feb 26, 2005, at 2:09 PM, Nick Matsakis wrote:

> One of the negatives of running appscripts to script apps is that
> MacPython icon appearing in the dock.  Not only is it useless, since 
> you
> can't interact with the app skeleton with the GUI, but it also slows 
> the
> launch of scripts.

It's only useless if the script you're running doesn't use it..

> I've managed to banish that icon by editing the Info.plist file of the
> Resources/Python.app/Contents folder of the Python framework.  All I 
> did
> was add the key LSUIElement with integer value 1, and the icon has been
> banished and appscript still works. This is great, but am I doing 
> myself
> any disservice by doing that?  What is that app used for, besides
> appscript?

It's definitely a disservice.  It is used any time that pythonw is 
used.  If you set LSUIElement to 1, then you can't run applications 
with a menu bar from pythonw.  wxPython, pygame, Tkinter, Carbon, etc. 
scripts should all have a problem with this.

If you want a faceless background application, run py2app over the 
script and set the LSUIElement key to 1 in that.

> By the way, what is the history of that icon?  Why is it a 16 ton 
> weight?
> Is there a chance it could look less ... classic ... in a future 
> version
> of Mac Python?

The weight as a reference to Monty Python.  I had a friend of mine do a 
more modern icon, but it was too snake-like for some people on the 
list: <http://pythonmac.org/img/py_mac-sq-64.png> (I have a higher 
resolution version, but I'd have to dig it up).

-bob



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