Hacking Leopard’s Dock

If you want to change the color of Leopard’s new dock, it turns out that it’s pretty easy - just replace the files that comprise the background. Thanks to a recent post that hit Digg, we know the location of the files and which ones specifically need replacing: in /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources. They provided a rather smoky glass replacement; I thought I’d go for something that has that more bluish-green look of normal glass. I didn’t nail the color dead-on - I’m no graphics designer nor do I really have an eye for colors - but I thought I’d post up the files for anyone who wants them.

So in Finder, head to /System/Library/CoreServices, and scroll down to Dock. Right-click on it and choose “Show Package Contents”. From there, head into Contents and then Resources below that. The four files in question are scurve-sm.png, scurve-m.png, scurve-l.png, and scurve-xl.png. First, make a backup of them somewhere. Then delete them. Finder will ask to authenticate, so go ahead and type in your password. Then drag in the new ones from the .zip file attached to this post (or go ahead and create your own* - just use the same resolution, and somewhere around 50% transparency) and authenticate that as well.

Finally, fire up Terminal and type “killall Dock” at the prompt in order to force Dock to restart. If all went well, you’ve got your nice new colored dock!

GreenDock-1.zip
*To save you the trouble of digging through the package contents just to get the file resolutions, they’re listed below:
scurve-sm.png: 900×128. scurve-m.png: 1280×128. scurve-l.png: 1280×98. scurve-xl.png: 1280×86. No, I have no idea why the XL version is smaller than the M, but that’s how it is. The images I made consist very simply of a solid fill of R105 G170 B155 at 50% opacity. Or somewhere around there - Pixelmator and DigitalColorMeter are giving me two different values, for some reason that completely escapes me. Experiment with it - you can, of course, do whatever you want. Having a solid opacity disables the reflections; higher transparency values will make it appear more reflective.

This doesn’t affect the colors of the dock when side-positioned, though those and other Dock-related images are all in the same folder - the glowing dot indicator, the “poof” animation, Trash, etc.

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