Make Your Own Dock

Hey

This post idea (and walk through) was written by Richard. It was pretty cool so I have decided to put it up. If you have any tips of your own that you would like to share please email me. This tip is very simple and fun to do. It is all about changing your dock background to something you have created. You can do this through Preview or through another image editing program like Photoshop.

The idea behind this trick is to change the background png files used in the dock to something we have created. These are only images so nothing to fancy. The first step is to back up the images we are going to change. Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources. In this folder you should find scurve-sm, scurve-m, scurve-l and scurve-xl. Back these images up by creating a new folder in Resources (or anywhere you want) and copying these four images into it.

The next step you can do in many ways. The best is to probably use Photoshop and crop and change you image how you like. Since many people don’t have Photoshop I am going to use Preview. Since we are only resizing images and not altering them in any way Preview is up to the job.

Open up your image in Preview, it needs to be quite large, and draw a large rectangle with the select tool. It needs to be a long thin rectangle, but don’t make it to thin (similar to the image below). Go to Tools > Crop, to crop out this part. The dimensions of the image need to be exact. Other wise it doesn’t work. Go to Tool > Adjust Size and change the dimensions to 1280 x 128. You may need to uncheck the Scale Proportionally check box. If you image doesn’t look that good and is a out of proportion, undo to before the crop stage and repeat the process again.

The next stage is to save out your image. Go to File > Save As and save the image as scurve-m.png. It needs to be a png. Save this to your desktop. Once as you have done this you need to change the dimensions for the other image. Change the dimensions again to 1280 x 98 and save as scurve-l. 1280 x 86 and scruve-xl and finally 900 x 128 and save as scurve-sm.

The penultimate step is copy these new images across into the resources folder in the dock.app. Its a simple case of dragging and dropping these new files across from you Desktop. You will need to insert you password to get it to work. As a final check Quicklook the images in preview to make sure they are correct. If not you may need to re-copy them. It was a bit temperamental on my system.

Finally, open up Terminal and type the following to restart your Dock:

killall Dock

Your dock will restart and the new dock design should appear. Mine is shown below. If you have any troubles make sure you have saved the images out correctly and the correct dimensions.

If you want to reset you dock you can copy your backup files across from your backup folder and restart your dock. Alternatively you can use this app from Leopard Docks. Its a quick way to find designs, install them and revert back if you have any problems. I think I have mentioned this application before.