[GNC] Dock Icon on Mac

Glen Byram glenbyram at talktalk.net
Tue Jun 12 20:56:45 EDT 2018


I am running macOS Sierra 10.12.6

I cannot get Gnucash to reside in the mac dock like other apps. I may have reported this issue before but I can’t find anything in gnucash-user and whatever solution I thought I had was only temporary.

 

1)  The normal process for placing an app into the dock permanently is to just drag it from the place it is installed (usually the Applications folder) to a position on the dock that you want.

Once this is done, you should be able to launch the app from the resulting dock icon. The same icon should bounce as it launches, then stop with a dot under the icon to show it is active.

The behaviour I see is that a duplicate Gnucash icon appears at the end of the dock and it is this one that bounces/indicates active app. Although functionally OK, I don’t want 2 icons for the same app when its running one instance.

 

2) I have tried the alternate method of keeping Gnucash in the dock; Make sure there are no Gnucash dock icons then launch it directly from the Applications folder. Once launched, right click on the active dock icon and select Options->Keep in dock. After that, I can move the icon to the position in the dock I want it to be. It now appears to work perfectly. Unfortunately, after I log out, or after some periods of sleep (not sure on the number-seems random) the Gnucash icon gets overlayed with a question mark indicating that the location of the app is now unknown – even though it has not changed and is still in the Applications folder. If I restart the machine when the Gnucash icon is working as expected, I get a grey question mark in the dock without even the Gnucash icon. Mousing over the grey question mark gives a Gnucash tooltip but of course it won’t launch as the location of Gnucash is unknown. The only option is to right click on the icon+question mark or question mark (by itself) and select Options->Remove from Dock.

 

As far as I can tell Gnucash is the only App I have that exhibits this behaviour. At the start, I thought I had fixed it using method 2 above. Then after several days the dreaded question mark appeared over the icon.

Other things I have tried include making an Alias for Gnucash and dragging that to the dock. It didn’t work and behaved like 1) above (duplicate app icon on launch).

I decided maybe the dock was corrupt so I did a reset to default: Terminal command; “defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock”

This meant I had to rebuild my preferred dock from scratch. There was no difference. All other app icons behaved as expected apart from Gnucash.

 

My conclusion is that Gnucash must have a launch process different to other apps and/or the drag/drop to dock processing must be different.

For the time being I tend to stick to Option 2 above as I prefer a single launch icon on the dock. When Gnucash eventually gets it’s inevitable question mark I remove it from dock then re-instate it as per 2) above. But it would be nice to have no need to do that. It’s not urgent or a matter of life and death but something to ponder.

 

Cheers

Glen

 



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