How to change your dock 'poof'

Jan 19, '01 12:15:25PM

Contributed by: robg

This one's fairly old, and may or may not work when 1.0 ships, but it's kind of fun. Over on this AppleInsider forum, there's a discussion on dock and poof hacking. Out of that are a set of instructions on how to change your dock's 'poof.' I've detailed the method in the remainder of this article, in case you're interested.

Out of that discussion, this page, created by Synoptic and others, contains a selection of pre-modified docks and poofs, ready for use with OS X. If you want to see what's possible with just a little bit of work, check it out and download some of the alternatives!

How To Create a Poof
Written by "Raul", visit his site for more fun stuff.

  1. Boot Mac OS 9 find the poof pdf on your X disk:
    /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/poof.pdf
  2. Copy it over to your OS 9 drive somewhere. Make a backup for safekeeping. Editor's note: You'll have to right-click in OS 9 and hit "Show package contents" on the Dock.app file to navigate deeper.

  3. Open the poof in Photoshop you will see 2 rows of pictures.The left side is the picture, the right side is the mask. The animation has five frames, and the frameheight is the total image height divided by 5. The framewidth is the total width divided by 2. What's that all mean? Basically, each frame is 128x128.

  4. Play with the images. Make sure that your mask lines up with the image. Save using the SingleImage PDF format, and use a new name.

  5. Remove the resource fork with Resedit or Gif Fixer. After you do this, you may not be able to edit the picture in Photoshop.

  6. Rename the picture to poof.pdf and put it back into:
    /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/poof.pdf
    Editor: Again, use the right-click to open the Dock.app package

  7. Reboot into X and see if it works.

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