Hiding applications from Mac OS X's task switcher
As someone who must constantly battle with myself to maintain focus on my work, it highly annoys me to have lots of applications open when I am only actually working in two or three. I wish that there was a way to say "Keep this application open but mute it and hide it from the tab switcher until I care about it again".
I had great hopes that Spaces would be that utility, allowing me to sequester application types off into separate Spaces like "Work", "Play", etc. Unfortunately, while Spaces does enable you to do that, all of the apps you have open are still shown in the task switcher regardless of whether or not they are shown in your current Space.
Dockless looked promising until I realized that while it does remove the app from the dock and the task switcher, it also removes access to the the app's menu bar and essentially access to the app entirely. While that will work for some of the apps I listed below, it's a little heavy handed for many.
For the record, I'm talking mainly about two classes of applications. First, those which need to be open in order to get updates for online content to be consumed later. Examples:
- iTunes which downloads podcasts periodically, some of which (due to the publisher's ignorance — NPR Hourly news I'm looking at you) will be missed if iTunes doesn't catch them before the next comes out.
- NetNewsWire which downloads RSS feeds, some of which have the same problem as the above for the exact same reason.
- Colloquy (IRC client) which I use periodically throughout the day by reading back over the log since my last check and responding. If you're not in channel, you have no log to catch up on and respond to. This is an example of an app that I sometimes want to be completely silent and other times to alert me when my name is written in channel (i.e. someone beckoning me)
Second, those applications which serve some utility either as background applications or for periodic need. Examples include:
- Billings.app which keeps track of the time I spend working on client projects. While I'm technically using this, I only interact with it periodically when I switch tasks, start or stop working.
- Skitch which I use to take screenshots. While I could just open this when I need it, that's a lot more keystrokes than just Command-5
- Desktop Folder X which adds nifty and important features to the open/save dialogs in Mac OS X
- Hardware Growler which posts notifications via Growl for hardware status changes (i.e. internet connectivity, disk issues, peripheral connections, etc.
- Last.fm which scrobbles anything you're listening to in iTunes to Last.fm
- MenuCalendarClock iCal which replaces the dock date and time with a much more useful version
- QuickSilver which, while being indispensible, is never, EVER accessed via the task switcher.
- The Finder which I don't need or use since I use PathFinder but which is opened every now and then by applications which are poorly coded and circumvent the standard API call which PathFinder intercepts. The worst way is the only way to kill the finder again is to stop and restart PathFinder.
I'm sure there are others but that should give you some idea of what I'm talking about. If you have workable solutions to these problems, I'd love to hear about them.
Comments
More info here:
http://www.macgeekery.com/gspot/2007-02/hiding_applications_from_the_dock