Removing a dock icon in OSX Mavericks programmatically

Question

Does anybody know any way to remove any application's dock icon on new OSX Mavericks using a script or using Cocoa? I have an uninstaller which has to remove dock icon of some applications after uninstalling them. But the existing logic fails in 10.9. I have been doing this so far (until 10.8) by removing the icon entry from the com.apple.dock.plist and then killing the dock. However, it doesn't work on Mavericks. I was able to remove the icon using NSUserDefaults however, but it also fails when my app (uninstaller) runs with elevated privileges. Any other idea/command/solution would be helpful.

Answer 1

I modified the code from the above blog post, and it works. The problem was that in Mavericks, -persistentDomainForName: returns an immutable dictionary, so I had to make it mutable to get it to work. I’m posting it here, because blog posts have a way of becoming dead links.

- (void)removeDockItemNamed:(NSString *)dockIconLabel
{
    NSUserDefaults *userDefaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];

    NSMutableDictionary* dockDict = [[userDefaults persistentDomainForName:@"com.apple.dock"] mutableCopy];

    NSMutableArray* apps = [[dockDict valueForKey:@"persistent-apps"] mutableCopy];
    if (apps != nil)
    {
        NSArray* appsCopy = [apps copy];
        bool modified = NO;
        for(NSDictionary *anApp in appsCopy)
        {
            NSDictionary* fileDict = [anApp valueForKey:@"tile-data"];
            if(fileDict != nil)
            {
                NSString *appName = [fileDict valueForKey:@"file-label"];

                if([dockIconLabel isEqualToString:appName])
                {
                    [apps removeObject:anApp];
                    modified = YES;
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        if(modified)
        {
            //If the dictionary was modified, save the new settings.
            dockDict[@"persistent-apps"] = apps;
            [userDefaults setPersistentDomain:dockDict forName:@"com.apple.dock"];
            //Reset the standardUserDefaults so that the modified data gets synchronized
            //and next time when this function is invoked, we get the up-to-date dock icon details.
            [NSUserDefaults resetStandardUserDefaults];
        }
    }

}

Source: http://macinstallers.blogspot.in/2013/12/remove-dock-icon-using-cocoa.html