Filed under: OS, Hacks, How-tos, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends, Leopard
How to tweak the Leopard Dock's color
Earlier, I posted about how you can revert those new lights in Leopard's Dock back to Tiger's old triangles (and I can't say I was too surprised to find out that most of you didn't want to revert anything-- do what feels right, man), and I said that the next thing to go would be Leopard's shiny Dock-top.And now, here we go-- Something Awful's echobucket has apparently found the files that need to be changed to edit the look of the dock. As with the triangles, the Dock elements have a few sizes to them, so replace the "scruve-x.png" files (where x is "l," "m," "sm," or "xl") in the Dock package's /Contents/Resources folder (make sure to back up the original files just in case, too), and then type "killall Dock" in the Terminal to restart it, and bingo, a slightly less bright dock.
In fact, just by changing the color of those pictures, you can change the color of the Dock itself (here's an orange dock on a black background for Halloween, via Digg commenter HacKing). It can't be too long before some enterprising programmer figures out how to put all of this inside an easy-to-use app, but here's the real question: if it's all this easy, why didn't Apple offer us this kind of customization ourselves? Sure, when you hand the paintbrushes to the people, things can get ugly, but they can also get much more beautiful, too.
[via Digg]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Carniphage said 9:40AM on 11-02-2007
The new dock is not very tasteful - but the smoked glass version is a bit less offensive.
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Brian said 5:41PM on 10-30-2007
Now if only you can find the bluetooth icon and change it back to blue.....
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Nicholas Arvanitis said 5:53PM on 10-30-2007
Someone really should develop a theme suite for Leopard, and not the crap that previously existed in Tiger (not naming names). I don't want 'themes' per se, but a comprehensive set of tools that can change the menu bar transparency on/off, change it's colour (though this can be done manually by painting a coloured strip at the top of your background image, but yanno what I meant). Further, why not allow for the changing of the colour of the Apple logo, hell a classic rainbow could be nice! So yea, the ability to de-glass the dock, change its colours and the menu bar as mentioned above would suffice. If they want to add themes in why not, but don't make that the only way to change the look of my OS like the current options. I want to see ala carte options like I spoke of. Most of it can be done manually, so someone needs to think money and write a program. I'd gladly pay £20 ($45).
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Patrick said 5:57PM on 10-30-2007
How sad is that I find myself wanting to know what the apps are for the icons I don't recognize in the orange dock? Anyone want to take a stab at what all the icons are for?
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James C. said 6:03PM on 10-30-2007
what's the iphone icon for on that orange-on-black dock?
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Deb said 6:19PM on 10-30-2007
Okay, I'll bite, I'm a techno idiot, the new files look identical to the old file names.......could you explain what I'm missing please.
Thanks, I appreciate the learning experience.
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Brian said 6:07PM on 10-30-2007
The iPhone is an app called iPhoney which emualtes the iPhone to help web developers.
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Jim O said 6:16PM on 10-30-2007
Okay, this is the best I can do:
1. Finder
2. Quicksilver
3.
4.
5. iTunes
6.
7. Fetch
8.
9.
10. Dreamweaver
11.
12. iPhoney
13.
14. VMware Fusion
15.
16. Yahoo! Messenger?
17. Time Machine
18. Photoshop
19. Mail
20. BlitzMax
21. Safari
22. iPhoto
23. Terminal
24. ichat
25.
26. Printer
Shameless Plug
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Patrick said 6:22PM on 10-30-2007
Jim O,
Those where all the ones I already knew! I meant to post a list of what I already knew.
I think 3 might be QuarkXpress. But I'm not for certain.
I'd love a website that somehow let you search through icons with tags and descriptions. It's one of the fun things about looking at other people's docks.
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Edward said 6:57PM on 10-30-2007
#4 is Flock (I think)
Left of printer is Neo-Office (open-source office)
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krye said 7:00PM on 10-30-2007
What is everyone complaining about?
The new Dock and Menu bar look awesome.
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EM said 7:13PM on 10-30-2007
The real question is: How to turn off the Dock perspective effect to get back to Tiger's Dock? By Tiger's Dock, I mean the original Dock, not Leopard's black version with those horrible rounded corners.
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Ryan said 7:13PM on 10-30-2007
Yeah I don't understand either, leopard looks great just the way it is...
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Dan Callahan said 7:14PM on 10-30-2007
Edward is right, #4 is Flock. In addition to that, #9 is Burn-osx, and #25 is NeoOffice.
That leaves 3, 6, 8, 11, 13, and 15 unidentified.
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Rorshach said 7:15PM on 10-30-2007
No 3 is QuickShareIt
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Mo said 7:32PM on 10-30-2007
I'm officially a convert to the smoked glass dock.
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nxiv said 7:46PM on 10-30-2007
i want to make the dock transparent. all i want to see are the icons and the open app indicator.
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J L said 7:46PM on 10-30-2007
Doesn't work for me...
Won't let me copy the files over.
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Michael R Johnson said 8:05PM on 10-30-2007
So, what happens if you delete the files, or replace them with 100% transparent png's?
Does the whole dock (including the "platform") become completely transparent?
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ominx said 8:08PM on 10-30-2007
I couldn't overwrite the original files either so I just deleted them (after backing up) and then copied over the new ones. Worked like a charm.
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