Mac OS X is full of eye candy some of us love, and some of us hate. In some cases, such as with older hardware running modern software, the eye candy can actually consume resources that could be put to better use. Bouncing dock icons are certainly not necessary, but are a nice touch. Those of us with multiple login items will appreciate this week’s hint.
To stop icons from bouncing in the dock, open up Terminal from the Utilities folder and type the following exactly, pressing the return key at each line break. Note that spaces and capitalization matter, and you really should have a current backup.
defaults write com.apple.dock.plist no-bouncing -bool TRUE
sudo killall Dock
You’ll then be prompted for your administrator password. Enter it, and press return. Voila!
To reverse this, open up Terminal again and type the following
defaults write com.apple.dock.plist no-bouncing -book FALSE