Relaunch the Mac OS X Dock
Problem
On my Snow Leopard machine this kept happening.
- The “open” indicator (glowing silver ball under the app icon) in the Dock was flaky, only showing for a few apps though more were running.
- The task switcher (which you see when you
option-tab/alt-tab) didn’t show all running apps. That RUINS it for me. I always use option-tab. - I hate rebooting.
Workaround–Restart the Dock process.
Open Terminal† and use one command:
killall -HUP Dock
Don’t be afraid of “killall”. HUP means “Hang Up” and is the normal way of telling something to relaunch.
Thanks to AcmeTech’s old post.
† Terminal is located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Or the quick Spotlight way is command-space, Terminal.
BTW this should work in pretty much all versions of OS X, though the problem isn’t as common anymore. Just now it worked fine on Mavericks and I used the same trick previously on Lion and Mountain Lion.