Fail: Tale of a Disappearing Dock Icon

Posted March 9, 2010 in General, Resource, Tutorial with No Comments

The other day while working my mojo developing a website on my Mac, I experienced something I’ve never experienced before. As I went to go open Safari to check my work, I clicked the dock’s icon and it disappeared (screenshot above).

My stomach instantly jumped in my throat. This is a new computer… what the hell just happened? The Safari icon just up and disappeared for no reason. I made a couple quick searches online and found some fixes but they all required stopping production, something I couldn’t afford at the moment.

As I continued working, I began to notice other icons disappearing–some document icons and even some icons to applications not previously in the dock. Something is seriously wrong. So, I did some more searching to find what the issue was and fix it. I came across this:

1. Drag the invisible icon out of dock.
2. Open Terminal and type this command to kill the dock: killall Dock
3. Drag the application icon back onto the dock.

I know “killall dock” doesn’t exactly sound like anything safe, especially in Terminal, but it worked. The  dock disappeared, reappeared and everything was good again. Back to my mojo.

This post isn’t exactly design related. I just hope it helps someone else out there fix the same issue I had and not have to search as long as I did for it.