Is it possible to show the dock icon when a new Window is called?

Question

I have an app that's shown as a Menu on the Status Bar, so I switched the "Application is agent (UIElement)" in plist to YES (because I dont want an icon on the dock just for a Menu on the Status Bar), but when I click an Item on the Menu a new window is called, is it possible to make a dock icon appear for that window? and disappear when the window is closed?

Answer 1

You will need to create a separate application binary/bundle to display that window. There is no supported way for an application to cause a Dock icon to be displayed on anything other than a per-process basis, or to dynamically hide/show the Dock icon while it's running.

Answer 2

You can show and hide the Dock icon of an application with NSRunningApplication+DockIcon but beware, this code uses undocumented APIs.

Answer 3

To set your application to be a foreground application, which causes its icon to appear in the Dock, and the app to appear in the Cmd+Tab list:

ProcessSerialNumber processSerialNumber = {0, kCurrentProcess};
TransformProcessType(&processSerialNumber, kProcessTransformToForegroundApplication);

And to change it back again:

ProcessSerialNumber processSerialNumber = {0, kCurrentProcess};
TransformProcessType(&processSerialNumber, kProcessTransformToUIElementApplication);