Customize your dock's appearance

Mar 30, '01 07:46:09PM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I got this tip from macosx.org, and they credit Graham Brown from resexcellence.com.

The look of the dock is created by 3 PDF files, called 'left.pdf', 'middle.pdf', and 'right.pdf'. These files can be opened in Photoshop and modified, to make the dock look however you'd like it to.

If you'd like more information on customizing your dock, read the rest of this article, and check out the original over on ResExcellence.

The path to these files is '/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/' If you are new at editing application resources, you'll have to ctrl-click 'Dock.app' and choose 'Show Package
Contents' to access them. Before you do ANYTHING, make a back-up of the PDF files in a safe place.

All three of these files are an 8x8 resolution. From what I understand, the left and right files must stay this way, but the middle may be whatever size you'd like. Keep in mind, when you are creating new designs, that the files will be repeated horizontally and vertically as necessary.

If anyone is familiar with this already, I've got a question, too. There are still remnants of the original greyish dock around the new appearance. How do you get rid of this, if you even can? Below is a screenshot that demonstrates the problem.

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