A while ago I noticed a post by Prakash G. R. on Planet Eclipse explaining how to add a Badge label on Mac dock icon. I decided to use his tip to display the number of unread articles. This was done by adding a new platform specific bundle fragment that contains the code and installs into the RCP application bundle. That way the feature is only loaded when on Mac OS X.

The icon was drawn using DrawIt which is a neat little vector drawing program. What I really like about it is the way effects can be applied in layers — without breaking the drawing. However it does have a few annoying bugs. For instance it will sometimes lock up and gradient strokes are often not painted. It’s still worth the price though and hopefully these issues will be ironed out eventually.