eugene gordin

In my search for the ability to hide an app’s dock icon, I ran across a little application called Dockless, which removes the application’s dock icon even when its running. The program is amazingly simple: it surveys all of the applications on your Mac and then gives you the option of having a dock icon for it while its running or not. You can just as easily restore the dock icon for an application as you hid it.

There is one downside to this approach (which as far as I know is the only approach to this problem). When you hide the dock icon for an application, you will no longer be able to control it if you close its window. Since you’d use Dockless on the kind of applications you want to hide tend to be those that should run in the background without much intervention anyway, this isn’t much as problem.

However, I have found that that problem is easily remedied by two different solutions

1. You can bring up the program’s main window by relaunching the program (a quick keystroke in Quicksilver or from Finder), which will bring up the program’s window again.
2. You can get to the program’s preferences by remembering the keyboard shortcut for preferences on a Mac (typically ? + ,)
3. Worse comes to worst, you can always rerun Dockless and re-enable the app’s dock icon. Configure what you need, and then hide the icon again with Dockless.

So there you have it – a simple app that provides a simple solution for an annoying problem – be sure and check out Dockless!

I turned to one side, and thought of things trivial and frivolous. I turned to the other, and thought of things critical and grave (this is my tried and tested tactic for sleep induction). But no matter to which side I turned, I simply could not seem to get some sort of strange verse out my head. It wasn’t something that I’d picked up during the day. In fact, I’d never even heard it before. Yet no matter what I did, I couldn’t help but recite it over and over:

So I rolled around, did my best to get it unstuck, but nothing worked. Frustrated and sleepy, I finally reached for my iPhone, charging on the nightstand beside the bed, and decided to write down the very verse which seemed to banish me to insomnia. Except that when I finished writing the verse, I didn’t finish writing. I just kept writing, verse after verse. From out of nowhere.

Now, let me be the first to disclaim that this cadence ridden logorrhea is far from brilliant, or even poetic by any standard. But what’s of interest is that I have no idea where it came from, or why it chose to come out in verse. After doing some research, it turns out that the ridiculous manner in which I chose to express myself lacks any sort of name, other than tail-rhyme or “aabccb.” However, I was reassured to discover that this type of rhyming scheme is typically employed by satirists and those seeking a lively and humorous tone. My verses were neither satirical nor humorous, but, sure enough, they were mine. Alright, enough description, here it is:

Now that you’ve read my peculiar midnight creation, you can take comfort in the fact that this exercise in lack of appropriate tone, meter, or subject matter has taught me one very important lesson: that I, in all senses of the word, am not a poet.