Create a “Sky” and “Wood” Custom Dock
I learned that the background on the Dock in Leopard is a set of 4 PNG image files, and I got the hamsters running. I made Sky and Wood for you, and here’s what they look like:
Installation
To ‘install’ them, go to /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock and click on the gear icon in the Finder window.
Select “Show Package Contents” and then go to Contents/Resources/ and copy these files in. They will replace the system images, so be sure to backup the originals!
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Nice. I bet most Leopard-ised tweak utilities (CandyBar, Onyx, Cocktail etc) will automate this process.
How did you get rid of the reflections? IIRC the stock Dock also draws reflections for all icons it carries but I see none in your versions.
Is it too simple to think that four transparent PNG’s would work to “erase” the dock background entirely, leaving the icons floating above the desktop?
Hello Todd,
I backed up my dock files and then copied over the wood files and nothing changed even after a reboot. Am I missing something?
If you’re comfortable using Terminal, you can use the command ‘sudo ditto Downloads/Wood/*.png /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/’ (assuming that Downloads/Wood/ is the location of the PNG files.
Todd,
Thank you for the quick response. The files are where they need to be just as per your directions but still no luck after an hour later. BTW, thank you for creating these files as well. I am going to try sky and see what happens.
Todd,
I noticed that sky has 6 files while wood only has 4? Is that normal?
I included the original file I cut the sky background from for anyone who is interested in customizing it some more.
That’s pretty nifty. I love the wood!
the wood isn’t working for me either
So they only work if your dock is on the bottom? I set my dock to the left. How do you make them work if you choose that option? Thanks and nicely done.