High Contrast Dock Replacement, With Handy Instruction Guide! Options

[Quicksilver]

Hey everyone!

Over the past couple of days, I've talked to a lot of people who aren't pleased with Leopard's new dock--interestingly, some them were actually annoyed enough to go through the pains of tweaking the Dock in order to make it better fit their idea of how the Dock should be. After seeing some of their ideas, I decided to try my hand at "modding" Leopard's dock. Here's what I came up with:


High Contrast (New)


Low Contrast (Old)


High Contrast (Full Size - Click to Enlarge)

If you have a chance, let me know what you think! If you want this dock for your own, you can send me a donation at--just kidding. The zipped file, available below, contains the new dock images, instructions, and Apple's original image files in case you want to restore the dock to its original hue.

Enjoy!

High Contrast Dock (Zipped, ~ 400K)

Note: I had trouble finding a place to put this file (I kind of doubt that Tuncer would approve of putting this archive--as small as it is--up on MGF), but thankfully, I finally figured out how to use my old Earthlink account's convoluted WebLife online storage. w00t!

[Lord Brixton]

Below?

[Quicksilver]

Sorry--it's up there now. Let me know if you have any other problems.

[Dark_Archon]

In my opinion, the perspective is much worse than the color. Because the vanishing point is so much lower than the vanishing point of the screen, it looks WAY too steep which bothers me(although the only way they could have fixed that is allowed the user adjust the "slope" which would have added a lot of complexity). The reflections are pretty neat, but the design just looks more obtrusive than the old dock.

However, the dark dock does look significantly better.

[Lemon Lime]

In my opinion, the perspective is much worse than the color. Because the vanishing point is so much lower than the vanishing point of the screen, it looks WAY too steep which bothers me(although the only way they could have fixed that is allowed the user adjust the "slope" which would have added a lot of complexity). The reflections are pretty neat, but the design just looks more obtrusive than the old dock.

However, the dark dock does look significantly better.

Thats just a problem with Apple wanting to be all 3D, if you like a dock that isn't as obtrusive, you can use the one that appears on the side. If you want that dock as the one that also shows up on the bottom, open up terminal and type:

CODE

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

then:

CODE

killall Dock

then if you want to get rid of that:

CODE

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO

then:

CODE

killall Dock

[Quicksilver]

Just a quick call for help--if you saw this, used this, like it, and have a Digg account, I'd appreciate it if you'd Digg this post!

http://www.digg.com/apple/Gorgeous_Mac_OS_...lacement_w_pics

Thanks!

[Lemon Lime]

Just a quick call for help--if you saw this, used this, like it, and have a Digg account, I'd appreciate it if you'd Digg this post!

http://www.digg.com/apple/Gorgeous_Mac_OS_...lacement_w_pics

Thanks!

We are in the top 10 for upcoming w00t!

[Lemon Lime]

Yay! digg front page.

We just set a new record for most people ever on the forums.

[Niels]

Thanks a lot for your Dock images. Looks wonderful.

I've just encountered a little problem (only on one of my two macs), Leopard just doesn't let me paste the new files using the Finder. If it happens, you can use the terminal:

CODE

Macintosh:~ niels$ sudo cp /Volumes/niels/Desktop/H.C.\ Leopard\ Dock/High\ Contrast\ Dock/* /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources

[Jim Phelps]

Great job. Worked perfectly. Much easier to see the icons.

[LeopardDocks.com]

Hey guys - I created a site just for Leopard Docks - http://www.leoparddocks.com/ - check it out and submit any and all designs you have done. Help me get this thing going!

[Janichsan]

89,097 views for this thread???

Geez, this seems to fulfil a huge need...

[Eric5h5]

89,097 views for this thread???

Geez, this seems to fulfil a huge need...

Behold the power of Digg.

--Eric

[Lemon Lime]

Behold the power of Digg.

--Eric

Yeah, IMG went down, actually for a little (or so people in the digg comments say).

[the Battle Cat]

89,097 views for this thread???

Geez, this seems to fulfil a huge need...

::shoved onto the stage::

Er... my publicist said that I should post in this thread. Um, I'd like to thank my agent, and all the little people I've crushed on the way up. Buy War Bonds, thanks for coming.

This thread in just a couple days has more than double the views of the Marathon IV Rumors thread which weighs in at 41,108 views! That's pretty amazing stuff. Click the link in my signature!

So Quicksilver, are you getting the response you wanted? Are there any inquires into your High Contrast Dock Replacement or is it just a lot of people clicking the Digg links near the top of the page out of habit?

[Lemon Lime]

or is it just a lot of people clicking the Digg links near the top of the page out of habit?

Number one story of the day day before yesterday, actually.

[Quicksilver]

This thread in just a couple days has more than double the views of the Marathon IV Rumors thread which weighs in at 41,108 views! That's pretty amazing stuff. Click the link in my signature!

So Quicksilver, are you getting the response you wanted? Are there any inquires into your High Contrast Dock Replacement or is it just a lot of people clicking the Digg links near the top of the page out of habit?

Hey, tBC! Well, to be honest, I didn't expect a response, although I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one to think that this is an interesting topic. It was actually my second submitted story to Digg, and as I posted it, my only hope (if you can call it that) was that it'd become a "popular" story (I say "popular" because it's unclear how Digg defines that). The more popular the topic, the more likely it is that someone at Apple might take notice.

I haven't been getting a lot of inquiries, actually, although I've been getting a lot of friend requests on Digg. However, I did meet a nice guy (a new Mac user) from New York who was having trouble applying the high contrast files to his Leopard installation. Via the magic of screen sharing, I was able to immediately look and see that the reason why my instructions weren't working was because he had set his dock to the 2D appearance via a popular Terminal command (glass dock -boolean no/yes, or whatever that command was). Anyway, the Digg effect is pretty amazing--once you hit some critical threshold of Diggs, the amount of traffic that your topic receives snowballs frighteningly quickly. There were three distinct phases that I observed:

Phase I: Obscurity - for over a day, the article, with less than 20 Diggs and only one or two comments, appears to be fading into obscurity.

Phase II: Minor Interest - the article hits enough Diggs to become a top "upcoming" story, and magically explodes into the low hundreds of Diggs.

Phase III: Major Interest - quite a few hours later, the article becomes "popular," making it to Digg's front page, and therefore is read by everyone and their mother. Suddenly, that little post has more views than the rest of the topics on the board combined.

[QuantaCat]

Sounds like an amazing story of power and success. Even though most people didn't even like your designs on Digg, it's still quite awesome.

[Lemon Lime]

Sounds like an amazing story of power and success. Even though most people didn't even like your designs on Digg, it's still quite awesome.

Which is why it has 1,900 diggs? .