Have Windows Applications Appear on Dock Even if FullScreen Mode

[cyrulnik]

Two related questions:

1. When Fusion is run in Unity mode, all of the active Windows applications appear on the Mac OS X Dock.

Is there any way to get this to happen even if Fusion is running in Fullscreen mode?

This is an option that works to great effect under Parallels -- if you click on one of the Windows apps on the dock, it will switch to the fullscreen windows window and bring up the application that you clicked on.

Is there a preference somehwere that could turn this on in Fusion?

2. Relatedly, I found the list of .app files for each of the Windows app that is accessible on the Mac side. But strangely, if a Windows app is already running in Fusion, and I launch one of those .app files, Fusion launches a second instance of that Windows application instead of just switching to the already running instance. This gets very annoying with Outlook, for example -- if Outlook is runnig, I never want to launch a second instance of the window.

Is there anything I am missing that would permit this to exhibit the normal behavior? Again, this is something that seems to work much better under Parallels.

Thanks very much in advance.

Owen

[WoodyZ]

Any Windows application that appears in the Mac OS X Dock while run in Unity view can be set to Keep in Dock however if clicked while the Virtual Machine is in Full Screen view it will create another occurrence and set focus to it.  It is not configurable otherwise.

As far as your second question, that is also the default behavior and is not configurable otherwise.

[cyrulnik]

Thanks. It's not quite true that it is not configurable otherwise. I played around a little bit with the info.plist file in the .app for Microsoft Outlook. I was able to change the executable to add a /recycle flag to force outlook to use an existing instance if there already is one running.

I need to think a little bit more about how to do that for Word and other windows apps, though.

[WoodyZ]

It's not quite true that it is not configurable otherwise. I played around a little bit with the info.plist file in the .app for Microsoft Outlook. I was able to change the executable to add a /recycle flag to force outlook to use an existing instance if there already is one running.

Sorry, I was speaking in terms of what is configurable via the VMware Fusion GUI and I should have mentioned that while not supported nonetheless one can hack the info.plist files however in the past many attempted modifications by Users to the info.plist files just did not work. It now looks like VMware has continued to improve the functionality of the helper application and has made it able to accept additional arguments to the command line.

[cyrulnik]

True, though they don't make it easy. The line in the info.plist that launches Outlook is written with a very strange syntax (including %20 instead of [space] and preceeded by a "file:///"), and simply adding the /recycle argument did not work. Interestingly, when I rewrote the whole line without some of the stranger syntax, and added the argument, it now seems to work as I intended -- at least for the moment.