This is a quick tutorial that shows you how to spice up your dock. Check it out after the jump.

First you need to BACKUP your original files before you overwrite them!

And since most of you are lazy (as I am) HERE is the backup for the files you should be altering.

To Navigate to the Dock Images Folder

1. Navigate to System/Library/CoreServices/
2. Right click on Dock.app and choose “Show Package Contents”
3. Then navigate to Contents/Resources/
4. Find the 4 ’scurve’ PNG files in here, you should see this:

These are the 4 Dock image files. They are in different sizes so no matter what size your dock is (snicker), you’ll have the crispest textures. So copy these to your desktop or new folder, and open them up in your favorite image-editing software.

Editing the Dock Files

Now the first file you should do any editing is the scurve-m.png file. Since this is the largest one, and anything you do you can easily be scaled down for the other sizes.

Here’s the fun part, DESIGN!!! Let your imagination run wild here. Paste in some textures, photos, ANYTHING you can think of. For example, here is the photo I used for ‘CoffeeTable’, because it actually is my coffee table:

Setting the Reflection on your Dock

Once you have your texture set up, you can now choose the ‘reflectiveness’ of the texture when it’s on your dock. This is determined by the transparency your texture layer is at. I usually choose anything from 90-75, depending on personal taste.

Now copy over your texture to the other 3 scurve PNG files and make sure that they are aligned and covering up the whole canvas.

Saving and Activating your custom Dock

You can either use this Automator script, written by Unplugged Software, or you can do it the exact same you accessed them the first place, but it can get tricky.

If you’ve do decided to do it by hand, then you’ll need to first DELETE the 4 png files in the ‘Resources’ folder (the four shown in the picture above). COPY and PASTE your new 4 pngs into this folder. Then you need to run Terminal, and type “killall Dock” (without quotes) and hit enter.

Posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 1:05 am under Design, Leopard, Apple.