Simon has a feature that many people have asked for over the years: the ability to hide the app from the Dock.
By default, the Dock icon is shown, but there is an option in the General Settings to hide it.
Why might you want to hide it? Maybe you want to keep your Dock as sparse as possible. Simon’s Dock icon can display the most interesting status, but maybe you don’t need to see that all the time, or you’re satisfied with seeing that only in the status menu. Since you’d probably want to keep Simon running all the time, treating it as a background-only app can make a lot of sense. Now you can!
If you turn off the Show the Simon icon in the Dock checkbox, the app icon vanishes from the Dock, and also from the Cmd-Tab app switcher. Note that if you have chosen the Keep in Dock option in the Dock menu, the icon will linger, in an inactive state; you can disable that or drag the icon out of the Dock to remove it.
When Simon is hidden from the Dock, you can still activate the app via the status menu, if you have that enabled — and the app will automatically turn it on when you turn off the Dock icon, as a convenience. If you don’t want the status menu, you can turn it off again… in which case the only way to activate the app will be to click on one of its windows, if any are visible, or open it from the Finder.
One thing to note is that as a necessary side-effect of hiding the Dock icon, Simon will no longer have a menubar. It’ll truly be a background-only app. When you display the Simon Monitor window, the menus won’t change from whatever other app you were using. This isn’t a problem for most functions, as the toolbar buttons and sort drop-down menu options cover most menu commands. But for app functions like checking for updates, accessing preferences, etc, when the Dock icon is disabled a special action menu is added to the toolbar. For power users, the keyboard equivalents still work, too — so you can press Ctrl-Cmd-1 to switch to Preview mode, for example.
I know that this is an exciting feature for many customers. For anyone who wants Simon to “disappear” into the background, try turning off the Dock icon. You can always turn it back on again. No restart required.