How do I change dock design in Mountain Lion?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1495519

Stuart,

Here is what I suggest to ALL Apple users that have a complain, an idea, suggestion, etc.

Put down your ideas and submit them directly to the Apple Feedback site. that's what it is there for.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Believe it or not, they do read it and sometimes, fingers crossed, they actually do what you ask.

I've submitted a LOT of ideas and many of them actually DID make it future product releases.

By the way, I'm an old ResEdit user from the late 80's. I had a ball with that. Especially in modifying the error messages. It's always fun to change the bit mapped graphics and wording to make it a little more, I don't know how else to put it, HUMAN and to give it a little more personality. I'm sure you can guess the kinds of things people like to do when we have spare time on our hands. Who knows, maybe my friends and I were partly the reason why we can't change the OS as much as we'd like. LOL. I've got a GREAT story, but unfortunately it uses some cuss words, but it was hilarious. :-)

Take care.

Hey I also thought of that @baltwo.

Here are some detailed intructions.

Okay so first, download the previous generation customizable Dock:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/79726330/Dock.zip

Then press Command, Shift, and G in Finder, to navigate to the directory where the dock is stored:

/System/Library/CoreServices

Now all you need to do is rename the original Dock that's already there to Dock_old or something, and drag in the Lion Dock you downloaded.

Before you log out for changes to be made, you need to disable Dashboard, or else there is a glitch where it starts floating around on your Desktop. (If you don't think Dashboard is a valid sacrifice for a customizable Dock, undo everything you already did. That came a little late.) To disable Dashboard, press Command, Shift and G again and go to /Applications/Utilites, where you will find Terminal.app. Open that up (this is your Unix command line) and type:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Note: If you don't trust me, do this after Logout/ Login. It will be much harder when your whole screen is clutered with widgets.

Now Logout and Log back In. Your Dock should look same old, and the apps you used for customization should work again. If you want to change back, go to Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Then, delete Dock from /System/Library/CoreServices, and rename Dock_old to Dock.

Sincerely,

An eleven year old.

P.S. Not responsible for any other disadvantages such as the lack of Notification Center (which many people hate anyways).

Is this previous generation customazible Dock from Lion or Mountain Lion DP3 ?

That's funny. I know there are some pretty astute Eleven Year olds out there.

I don't hate Notification Center. I use it every once in a while. So far, I like Mountain Lion. It's easy to restore the OS and I've had very little problems with it. I'm looking forward to 10.9 has.

I just wish they had something as simple as Res Edit like they did with Mac OS years ago. I had a lot of fun with that. I liked modifying warning messages to make them a little more personal with a sense of humor.

Alright Uzver/' it was the Lion Dock. The DP3 Dock is less glitchy (and it has Notification Center, David!).

I have it right here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/79726330/Dock.zip

Press Command, Shift, and G in Finder, to navigate to the directory where the dock is stored:

/System/Library/CoreServices

Now all you need to do is rename the original Dock that's already there to Dock_old or something, and drag in the DP3 Dock you downloaded.

Thanks XplozionMan for all your input, it's much appreciated! Replacing the new dock with the old dock is one of the first things I have tried . And just to save people time, it's not really working. 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, see the picture below. The OSX Mountain Lion dock is still visible underneath the wooden dock.

Indeed, the DP3 dock has almost no glitches and Notification Center as well as widgets are working flawlessly. But it's not really solving the main isssue, that is to fully replace or hide the new OSX ML dock.

Yeah I see that... that's what happened on my retina MBP but it worked fine on an iMac. Might be something deep in the resources. But it's better that nothing, right?

I use the same exact icon set by the way.

And, this is what shows on my iMac with the earlier Dock. As for a retina-equipped machine, I don't have one and defer to others.

Thanks, XplozionMan 🙂 Everything is fine, except small artefacts at the edges of dock (because of the difference in size of old dock). Finder and trash icons restored to original in Candybar. NC and Dashboard (not as space) also works good. But customable dock is not compatible with Totalspaces 😟

I was able to turn the Dock to 2D dark by typing the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool yes;killall Dock

Just copy/paste and at least the color is darker. To make it 3D with a shelf, there's other discussions that talk about downloading an app to type UNIX commands. Since I don't know much about this, and am afraid of messing something up, this Terminal command does the trick.

Hope this helps!

Thank you mediumiddle for bringing this app to my attention. MacUtil is a customization application for the Mac. It allows you lots of customization options ranging from the two dimensional dock to modification of CoreOS files.

It's certainly feature rich but it doesn't let you change the dock shelf background. There is a nice partial transparent 3D Dock option, but it's still not what I or most people on here are looking for.

To save people some time I have added some screenshots of the app and dock effects, you can click on the images to get a larger view:

Old Dock:

MacUtil Partially Transparent 3D Dock:

App - Dock Tab:

App - Finder Tab:

App - User Interface Tab:

App - Misc Tab:

My 2D (if you like my 2d dock I can tell you guys where to get it and how to install it on your system):

While the creator of the app has added some pretty cool features, it's still not what the majority of users who'd like to customize their dock is actually looking for. As mention in some of my previous posts regarding desktop customazation on OS X Mountain Lion, there is no way how you could make OS X 10.8 display an image dock background, since Apple no longer uses png files to compose the dock, unless by code injection but I don't see how that would be possible since OS X is closed source.

I hope you find this information useful!

Best regards,

Stuart

mediumiddle wrote:

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/47267/macutil

try this

Thank you d00bro for the info. DockMod seems to be a promising application, it allows you to display an image as as your dock background, you can get the trial version from here: http://spyresoft.com.

It works like a charm guys and I have my 3D wooden dock back Yes!!!!!!!!!! $8 well spent!!!!

Here are some screenshots, click on the images to get a larger preview:

How does the image as a background work?

To set an image as the dock background, just drag and drop the image onto the thumbnail area, or click the “Choose” button and select the image you want from the window that appears.

By checking the “overlay” box, the gradient that you have set will show up beneath the image if you adjust the opacity to make the image transparent. This makes the image look more like an overlay on the gradient. Without the overlay box checked, adjusting the opacity on the image will make the dock appear “see-through”, and the desktop beneath will show.

For best-looking results, it’s important to understand exactly how the image is used so you can make it look how you want. With the ‘Windowed’ image scaling option selected, the image is not scaled. Instead, as the dock grows or shrinks, more of the image is allowed to show through, almost like the dock is a window to the image beneath. Therefore, the size of the image you use needs to be at the very least the width of your desktop, and the height of the maximum height of your dock when stretched full (usually between 200 and 300 pixels, depending on your monitor resolution).

Enjoy!

Stu

d00dbro wrote:

Sadly, Docker isn't updated for now (if ever). You can still customize the Dock, just not like you did it before.

This is a really nice app but costs money or else it stops after an hour: http://spyresoft.com A bit expensive, so I'd look at the other options as well. Personally, I only go for freeware when it comes to these things.