![]() ![]() Small changes, big usability impactīy changing a single UI control, and consolidating two modal dialog boxes into one, the LaunchBar developers have created a much cleaner, more reliable process for restarting their application. If you click the checkbox when LaunchBar’s Dock icon is hidden, the icon instantly appears in the Dock and the Application Switcher without requiring any further user interaction. You can change the number of rows or columns with for example defaults write springboard-columns -int 8 killall Dock, but the maximum number of icons per page wont be increased. As a result, and unlike the button of the previous design, the checkbox will always properly reflect the app icon’s current hidden/visible status. Even if you could hide it, the space wouldnt probably be used to display more icons. More importantly, though, you cannot defer the application restart anymore: If you click “Cancel”, the dialog box closes, and the state of the checkbox instantly reverts back to checked. A button allows the user to reveal all the icons. The separate dialog box for restarting the application is gone. Starting with Windows XP, the user can choose to always show or hide some icons, or hide them if inactive for some time. But if they are checked in Core Settings, they can still be hidden if Configuration > Core Settings > Application Layout > Toolbars > CommandLine Bar > Quick. But instead of just showing an “OK” button for dismissing the dialog box, the default button says “Restart Now”. ![]() In the current version of LaunchBar, the “Hide/Show Dock Icon” button has been replaced with a “Show Dock Icon” checkbox.Īs soon as you change the setting, the same elaborate warning message appears. The most obvious of these being that the button label would already change to “ Show Dock Icon”, even though the icon had not actually been hidden yet. This latter dialog also allowed you to defer the restart, however, which led to a number of weird problems. At this point in the process, you could cancel the change, or confirm it, in which case you’d see another dialog box requesting a restart of the app. This would summon a dialog box that lists all the consequences of hiding the icon. Previously, you had to click a button labeled “Hide Dock Icon…” in LaunchBar’s preferences panel. Without LaunchBar’s icon constantly showing in the Mac’s Dock and Application Switcher, navigating between all other running programs is easier and quicker. The setting that requires the restart, is for hiding the app’s Dock icon. As such, it is constantly running in the background, waiting for user input. LaunchBar is an “application launcher” utility. The problem of letting the user defer an application restart I previously examined five ways of requesting such a restart.įor one of the apps featured in that article, the developers have noticeably improved this process - by implementing just two changes in the User Interface. That way you have just one evil thing to support instead of everybody’s home-grown undocumented hack.” It’s sort of the Taskbar Needle Exchange Program.When you change an application’s settings, you sometimes have to restart the app before the change will take effect. Heck, I don’t even know if it works at all! Not my area of expertise.) The story I heard was that so many programs were doing exactly what they shouldn’t be doing-namely forcing their feature on, overriding the user’s preference-that the Taskbar folks decided, “If you can’t stop people from doing a bad thing, at least make them do the bad thing under your supervision. (I don’t know whether it works for Quick Launch. I’m told that Windows Vista added a new ITrayDeskBand interface that does indeed let you turn taskbar bands on and off. The user is the arbiter of what goes into the Taskbar. Much like the program that wants to uninstall other programs, the taskbar would become a battleground among programs that each wanted to force themselves on and force their opponents off. Explorer consciously does not expose an interface for showing and hiding taskbar bands because it would just be a target for abuse. Whether the Quick Launch bar is shown or hidden is an end user setting, and programs should not be overriding the user’s preferences. ![]() ![]() That’s not something a program should be doing. Activate it from System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Launchpad & Dock by selecting Turn Dock Hiding On/Off. You will then be prompted as to whether or not you want to close the toolbar. it (so that launchbar buttons are hidden if the user removes the application. Then click on the Close toolbar menu option as shown by the red arrow in the image above. Commenter Mihai wants to know how to show or hide the Quick Launch bar programmatically. Since last nights update, i have been unable to add an application via the. ![]()
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