I know what I said in the video I made this last weekend. I thought that Leopard’s new Dock was really growing on me. Then I thought about the things I really like about Apple; the powerful simplicity of their technology mirrored in simple appearances. So I looked at it again with slightly older eyes and decided… I wanted to return to the Dock in 10.4 “Tiger”.

Well, I looked around the hacking forums and found out a few things. I tried some of the suggestions and came up recently with a good step in the right backwards direction. So far, it looks good, but not quite the way I want it. It’s much more simple, though, and easier on the eyes. I’m also going to post this query in some of the forums and sites I frequent, like I did in the Facebook Mac Users forum:

I’ve tried to mod the Dock file in CoreServices to look more like the Dock I know and love from Tiger. It involved using the “defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES” command in Terminal, then scrapping some PNG files. Here’s my results so far:

http://esoterik72.net/images/chrisw357dock.jpg (Click to see image)

Anyone have suggestions on how to get rid of the dark background? I couldn’t find corresponding image files for that. I’ll be changing the divider stripe to a solid thin line, but I do like the blue-white indicators.

I’m trying to get the Dock to the way I had it in Tiger; totally transparent. That way, the icons just float in space. I almost had it today, but the stupid reflective surface they hardwired into the dock’s glass “defaults write” option just kills the effect! Ah well… I’ll keep pluggin’ away at it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Apple Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.