How do I change dock design in Mountain Lion?

Hi davscanlon!

Since there is no restore to defaults option under "System Preferences" I found that the easiest solution is to restore the dock from the terminal.

This should help you to restore the dock to it's default settings. Let me know if it works for you, I can't test it right now because I downgraded to OS X Lion a few weeks back..

Here is how you can restore your OS X Mountain Lion Dock to it's default settings:

• Open a new Terminal Window (you can do this by hitting command + space and typing terminal)
• Type defaults delete com.apple.dock and hit Return
• Type killall Dock and hit Return

Best regards,

Stuart

Didn't work I'm afraid.

The ultimate question is, where is the GPU rendering this basic grey dock from?? and where is the .plist that tells it to overlay the dock with .png files? 😕

I'm afraid the new 3D shelf is rendered at runtime so customizing it would require code injection (which is never the way to go). Apple no longer uses png files for the dock image, you can simple see this when you take a screenshot of your dock (cmd+shift+4 move your mouse over your dock and hit the space key).

So basically dock customization as of 10.8 is no longer possible. More and more we are pushed into a mold but in the beginning Apple told us to be creative and break the mold. I see OS X Mountain Lion as another mile marker on the super highway of lost functions and diminished individuality.

10.8 is a travesty sure, but if others didn’t see the writing on the wall with Lion, then (a) they should have and (b) what an unfortunate shock ML must be! It brings to mind the classic Apple “1984″ ad except we have seen the enemy and it is well you know who it is! That chick needs to chuck that Olympic hammer right through Tim Cook’s glassed in office! Seriously, we have come full circle and it’s dare I say Linux who is actually doing some interesting innovative things these days!

The saddest and most heartbreaking aspect of this current state of affairs is that the venerable Apple spirit of innovation seems to have been crushed under the boot of protecting users from themselves and all that formerly creative and innovative thinking seems to be marshaled into sandboxing, jailed-apps, DRM, and the inbred, not right in the head offspring of OSX + IOS.

IOSX: the Sad, Shackled, Captive, Declawed Lion.

OS X Mountain Lion: The OS that nobody asked for yet all are stuck with.

Most insulting fact that everything about 10.8 reeks of contempt for the user and a patronizing paternalistic “we know what’s best for you” attitude that basically can be summed up thusly: “You are dumb, try not to mess this up”!

In closing, remembering the “good old days” where one had the freedom to customize his desktop (this freedom of course was not directly given by Apple), but one could remedy the lack of customization by using third party applications like candybar and so on. Is it too much to ask for two or 3 lines of code that would allow the user to customize his dock? Like for example, the could add a tick box under System Preferences > Dock > for transparency and another one for custom image. If Apple is too lazy to do it, I'd be more than happy to volunteer to write and add the code myself.

Totally with you man!

Thanks buddy!

I've been working hard on a solution but to no avail, since Mac OS X is closed source (with open source components) unfortunatey not open source enough for me to manipulate the dock.

It is a sad day when features get put down just because they don't fit in Apples grand scheme of world domination, and we should all look and act the same, “Think Different” they told us. Software like Candybar was thinking different long before Apple was, Candybar, IconFactory and Resedit were staples of the customizing your Mac experience. This is a sad day indeed, thanks again to Panic for all of your work and for making Candybar free, hopefully Apple will change their course, but I doubt it.

I concur with my friends predictions about our once beloved Apple. Apple will soon find that their decisions have driven off their most valuable customers and users. Not that they care, I’m noticing that they are going back to Apple Computer circa 1994, all of the “Cool” additions that they are adding to ML have been done before, and they are diluting their market with all kinds of cr@p. Do we really need two sizes of iPads and multiple types of iPods, all with similar price points? Raise your hand if you remember when there were 10 professional type Macs and 15+ education type Macs, not to mention the Messagepad and eMate. Apple was swirling in the gutter, If Steve had not thrown everything out they would have died long ago. Now they are swirling again. Only they do not know it. It is a sad sight to see for the Apple users that went through their dark times with them. My last upgrade was to OS X Lion for the machines that I have, and Snow Leopard for the older ones. I will not even let them upgrade my work machine to ML. My next computer will be a Linux (Ubuntu) machine, and my next phone will be an Android based device. And If I ever get a tablet it too will be an Android.

So long Apple..It was wonderful, and I had a great time, but everything has to come to an end at some point.

If you have an earlier ML installer app, you might try its Dock app or try the one from Lion.

Unfortunately there is not a way to have it display an image, since Apple no longer uses png files to render the dock. The way it works is, the kernel tells your graphics card to display a light grey/dark grey color composition in a shape of a dock.

In machine code, there is an instruction (command) that moves a floating-point value into a floating-point register in the cpu. This floating-point value is a value between zero and one with zero being black and one being white, and decimal values in between would be a shade of gray (light grays being closer to one and dark grays being closer to zero). I can simply overwrite the instruction that moves the gray value into this register with an instruction that zeroes out the register instead, therefore making it zero (black). Using this simple method there is no way to make it any other color other than gray (because the code for that does not exist already in the program) but I also cannot even make it any other color than black because the length of the instruction to do that would be longer than the instruction that is already there and would overwrite code that we still need.

In plain english, the new mountain lion dock can only be manipulated to display a light grey/dark grey or black colored dock. That's it, there is no solution to this problem.

One has only two options, either to downgrade to OS X Lion or to use the 2D dock in Mountain Lion.

I'm going to use my iMac OS X Lion until April and then I'm selling it and moving on to Linux.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Because the kernel will still tell your graphics card to render a light grey/dark grey color composition in a shape of a dock, overwiting the old png dock.

In addition, this will break your Dashboard since it has been rewritten in Mountain Lion to work with the new dock.

Wow, this is incredibly lame...that light grey dock about burns my eyeballs everytime I look at it. I have to have some sort of black dock, or I won't get anything done. I guess I blindly assumed the dock and icons would always be custmizable.

Nevermind... Answered my own question there..

Message was edited by: mwille

Omek wrote:

Wow, this is incredibly lame...that light grey dock about burns my eyeballs everytime I look at it. I have to have some sort of black dock, or I won't get anything done. I guess I blindly assumed the dock and icons would always be custmizable.

Put the Dock on the side. Then it will be black.

Nevermind, I finally found someone who wrote a script that allows you to have a black dock in ML.

Thanks for the feedback. Mind sharing the script or its source? Others might be interested in your find. 😉

Sure, just google:

[Desktop] How To Get a Black Dock On Mountain Lion

It should be the first post you see there on macrumors. Not sure if Apple will allow me to link directly to it, but it's right there. And I must say, I actually like this black dock more than my previous custom ones in Lion.

Omek wrote:

Sure, just google: How To Get a Black Dock On Mountain Lion

It should be the first post you see there on macrumors. Not sure if Apple will allow me to link directly to it, but it's right there. And I must say, I actually like this black dock more than my previous custom ones in Lion.

Thanks. You can post any links you want. I perused those macrumors links, but don't see the script you mentioned.