MacOS – Prevent application from displaying badge icon in Dock

dockmacosnotifications

Any Spotify desktop user has likely noticed their pervasive notifications: whenever "one of our friends" joins Spotify, there's both an in-app notification as well as a red badge that appears on Spotify's icon in the Dock.

Spotify Dock icon, with badge, for reference

Is there a way to disable an application's ability to show a badge on its Dock icon?

I'm using Lion (10.7.8), and therefore don't have the 'Notifications' prefpane that was introduced in Mountain Lion.

I tried digging around in the app's resources and .plist file to see if there was a setting to enable/disable this… to no avail.

Best Answer

No - the normal path is to use the Notifications prefpane to turn off notifications, but this would not help, since Spotify is not listed there.

I'm also very annoyed by Spotify's constant flood of notifications. I wonder if there was a way to drop all the social-related network traffic that goes into Spotify and somehow nip these notifications at the bud.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Dock Notifications Displaying Odd Red Icons Instead

This looks like it might be a problem with a system font. Try this...

Open Font Book (in /Applications)
Select the "All Fonts" collection in the left-hand pane
Click any font in the right-hand pane to focus that pane
Select all the fonts using Edit -> Select All or Cmd+A
In the File menu, click "Validate Fonts"

If any fonts are corrupt, this method should alert you to the problem.

Font Book - Validate Fonts menu option

Font Book - Font Validation window

MacOS – way to suppress badge counts and the dock icon bounce for Terminal.app in Lion

Google finds an example of what is, I think, disabling bounces for all Dock icons (not Terminal alone):

Annoying infinite bounces of an icon on alert!!!

defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE

However, that may be not the solution in this case. Puzzling me:

[macbookpro08:~] gjp22% date
Tue  2 Aug 2011 13:40:41 BST
[macbookpro08:~] gjp22% uname -a
Darwin macbookpro08.centrim.freeman-centre.ac.uk 11.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.0.0: Sat Jun 18 12:56:35 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1699.22.73~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
[macbookpro08:~] gjp22% defaults read com.apple.dock no-bouncing
2011-08-02 13:40:57.029 defaults[2501:303] 
The domain/default pair of (/Users/gjp22/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, no-bouncing) does not exist

— nothing relating to no-bouncing my preference file, and I can run for example

tail -f -n 50 /private/var/log/system.log

— then bring something other than Terminal to foreground, watch things added to the log and in my case:

lines added to the background window do not cause any bounce, do not cause any count to appear in the Dock icon.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Dock Notifications Displaying Odd Red Icons Instead

MacOS – way to suppress badge counts and the dock icon bounce for Terminal.app in Lion

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