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Leopard - Invisible Dock and Black Dock

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Are you getting bored already with your monotonous looking Dock?

Invisible Dock

When I browse throughout my Leopard, I've found out that there are several image files in PNG format that control the appearance of the Dock. I tried to delete those files ( I made backup before that ) and I got invisible glass for my Dock. Let's see what are those files.

The glass where your icons sit is controlled by image files named scurve. It's separated into four files, scurve-sm, scurve-m, scurve-l and scurve-xl. I think scurve stands from super curve. I hope I'm not wrong. The one white line at the bottom of the Dock is controlled by an image file named frontline. A line that divide Dock into two parts is controlled by an image file named separator.

And all of them are located inside :
Macintosh HD ▸ System ▸ Library ▸ CoreServices ▸ Dock ▸ Contents ▸ Resources

Each time you want to delete file from Dock, you need to be an administrator. Leopard will prompt you the dialog box for you to enter your administrator username and password. As usual, it's for security.

I believe you now can make your invisible Dock. Let's move forward.

Black Dock

The fastest way :

  1. Move out all files that I've mentioned before
  2. Open them with Preview
  3. Call up the Adjust Color Tool (you can see my previous article Leopard - New Preview Tools) and set the White Point at the same point as the Black Point for all image files
  4. Save your new settings and move them back to your Dock resource folder
  5. Enter valid administrator username and password
  6. Use Terminal command line killall Dock
  7. Now, you can enjoy your brand new Black Dock

You also can tweak around with your Preview to get different colors, such as Blue Dock by setting the Temperature Point to its lowest.

In case you forget to back up your original Dock files, you can download them again here : Dock Attributes.

And I won't forget attaching my Black Dock Black Dock.

Categories: Imaging, Leopard, Popular
Tags: Dock, Leopard

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