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]













Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
10-30-2007 @ 5:41PM
Brian said...
Now if only you can find the bluetooth icon and change it back to blue.....
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 5:53PM
Nicholas Arvanitis said...
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).
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 5:57PM
Patrick said...
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?
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 6:03PM
James C. said...
what's the iphone icon for on that orange-on-black dock?
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 6:07PM
Brian said...
The iPhone is an app called iPhoney which emualtes the iPhone to help web developers.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 6:16PM
Jim O said...
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
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 6:19PM
Deb said...
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.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 6:22PM
Patrick said...
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.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 6:57PM
Edward said...
#4 is Flock (I think)
Left of printer is Neo-Office (open-source office)
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:00PM
krye said...
What is everyone complaining about?
The new Dock and Menu bar look awesome.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:13PM
EM said...
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.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:13PM
Ryan said...
Yeah I don't understand either, leopard looks great just the way it is...
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:14PM
Dan Callahan said...
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.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:15PM
Rorshach said...
No 3 is QuickShareIt
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:32PM
Mo said...
I'm officially a convert to the smoked glass dock.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:46PM
nxiv said...
i want to make the dock transparent. all i want to see are the icons and the open app indicator.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 7:46PM
J L said...
Doesn't work for me...
Won't let me copy the files over.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 8:05PM
Michael R Johnson said...
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?
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 8:08PM
ominx said...
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.
Reply
10-30-2007 @ 8:12PM
ominx said...
Oh and in addittion to the scurve files, you should also edit frontline.png
Reply