Preventing an app from coming to the front?

[mfuse]

I want to know if anyone knows of a share/freeware app or hack that will allow me to prevent unwanted applications like (stuffit expander, or Eudora) from coming to the front when I am in another application.

Its quite annoying when I am trying to surf and stuffit expander keeps opening to unstuff my downloads, but it prevents me from typing a url, or clicking on a link.

I want all apps to stay behind the current front most application.

Anyone know of a way to do this?

[rgoer]

You should check out ASM (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=10410&db=mac)... I've actually never used it, but I understand it allows you to set show/hide parameters on a per-application basis.

Or...

If you are the adventurous type, and you don't think you'll ever find yourself in a situation where you'll need Stuffit Expander to be the foremost application, you could just change Stuffit into a daemon process (i.e. background only). I don't think that this would affect its ability to decompress files, but you will never be able to interact with the Stuffit interface. You would only be able to operate Stuffit by opening files from the Finder (or Coelia or SNAX or the Terminal or whatever). Anyway, to accomplish this, just open Stuffit Expander's Info.plist (whatever/Stuffit Expander.app/Contents/Info.plist) and add these two lines to the end (but before the close of the <dict> tag)


<key>NSBGOnly</key>
<string>1</string>


you can transform any application (that has an Info.plist) into a background daemon this way. Like I said, I'm not sure how this will affect Stuffit's performance (or even if it will at all), so exercise caution when trying this out.