I’ve run into this in a few places and use it myself. It doesn’t do anything useful, but it is pretty.

There’s a hidden option on the Dock which will display the icons for hidden applications as translucent images instead of the normal opaque icons. It’s a very pretty effect and is slightly useful to let you quickly know why you don’t see your Safari window.

In order to set the dock to do this, you’ll need to open a terminal window (from Applications | Utilities) and type in the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true
killall Dock

The first line sets the hidden preference for the dock. The second kills the current instance of the dock, which the system will automatically restart.

If you ever want to change it back, do this:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool false
killall Dock

[tags]finder, dock, macintosh, mac os x, translucent, icon, hidden[/tags]

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