After using Leopard for the past week and resisting the urge to “play”, I finally gave in and began messing with some of my Dock settings. These leopard tweaks and hints have appeared several places and this is our experience with them.

Changing The Dock

After a brief 10 minute process, my Dock now appears like this:

The process is straight forward and quick, to modify the look of your dock you will need to:

• Navigate to Macintosh HD -> /System/Library/Core Services/
• Right Click on Dock and Click Show Package Contents
• Navigate to Contents/Resources
• Backup the files scurve-s.png, scurve-m.png, scurve-l.png, scurve-xl.png and frontline.png
• Modify these files to your liking and replace them. For our team, we had to delete the files completely and then add them back into the directory. There seems to be some issues with authentication and copying files into this protected directory. We could not just do a copy/replace.
• Optionally, If you do not feel graphically inclined, Leoparddocks.com has many pre-made dock modifications available for download.
• Open Terminal and type “killall Dock” note: You must spell Dock with the capital “D” to correctly kill the process
• Your nice, new Dock should now be present

Changing the Dock Indicator

To change the Dock status indicator follow the steps listed above and swap out the files indicator_small.png, indicator_medium.png, indicator_large.png, indicator_small_simple.png, and indicator_medium_simple.png. Be sure to make a backup of these files as well!

We hope these hints serve you well, changing our Dock was a breeze. It will only be a matter of time before an application exists to automate this process. Have you modified your Dock? We would love to hear about your experience and any further tips. Leave a comment below!