Cosmetic Leopard Desktop Adjustments: Dock, Menu Bar, Stacks

October 29th, 2007

Leopard Adjustments
My new Leopard Desktop.

AppleIn two of my previous Leopard-related posts, I mentioned some annoyance at the look of the Dock, Menu Bar, and Stack icons. Normally these wouldn’t be such a big deal, but since these elements are constantly on the screen of my Mac, I decided to employ some work-arounds.

The Dock

Problem: I’m just not into the 3-D Dock. I prefer the translucent 2-D Dock with rounded corners that is used when the Dock is on the left or right side of the screen.

Solution: A tip offered up by by DaveD:

  • Fire up the Terminal (Applications/Utilities/)
  • Enter: defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
  • Press return.
  • Reload the Dock by typing: killall Dock
  • Press return.
  • Woohoo.

Creating A Solid Menu Bar

Problem: I don’t care for the translucent menu bar.

Solution: This is a little weak, but a decent kludge. The biggest downside is you’re limited to the desktop images you perform this highly technical operation on.

  • Open your desired desktop image in your favorite graphic editor.
  • Resize it to your monitor size.
  • Add a black bar at the top of the image that spans the entire width of the image that is 20 pixels high.
  • Save your image.
  • Set your desktop image to your new, partially censored one. The black bar shows up behind the Menu Bar and makes it solid.

I suppose some other customizations might be various colors, or even adding some crazy background glow to the Apple Icon or other Menu Bar items.

Custom Stack Icons

Problem: The default icons for the Applications, Documents, and Downloads folders in the Dock were bugging me. I like being able to see what’s in the folder, but looking at the Address Book icon was making me sad for some reason.

Solution: Another kludge:

  • Open the Applications folder.
  • Create an empty folder in the Applications folder.
  • Rename said empty folder to “a” (so it will appear first, alphabetically).
  • Paste a desired icon on the “a” folder.
  • Click and hold the Application Stack in the Dock, and set it to sort by name.
  • Repeat the above process for all your Stacks.
  • Restart to get the custom icons to show up.

All in all these little adjustments didn’t take too much time, and now my desktop is tolerable until someone releases an app that will fix this stuff in more traditional ways.

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  • DaveD
    Thanks for the credit, but it really should go to John Gruber at DaringFireball... this tip appeared in my RSS feed last Wednesday and I immediately knew it was a keeper. When you mentioned how annoying it was, I was just passing the tip on.

    As for the menu bar, this popped up in MacUpdate - which I found via John Siracusa's always excellent OS X reviews:

    http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/opaquemen...

    I'm a bit wary of trying it (mainly because I couldn't find any screenshots and wonder how the pulldown's look) but since my development machine is a clean install of Leopard I expect I'll be trying it tonite or tomorrow. I'll let you know what I find!
  • The guys over at macosxhints.com have some great stuff re: the dock. There's an applescript that does exactly what the command you mentioned above does, and another that reverts the dock back. And today they have a post on how to change the background of the dock as well.

    As for me, I'm actually sticking with the defaults, for a while. Just to see if I get used to them. The idea of the Address Book icon WOULD annoy me, but I don't have a stack for my Applications (Quicksilver = love of my geek life). Heck I still have the star wallpaper.

    I have to say, I am enjoying Leopard so far.
  • Yep everything else has been smooth sailing. My last annoyance to figure out is why Front Row on the Mac Book isn't displaying album art from the Mac Mini, and I have some keychain reorganization on the Mac Mini. But over all I've encountered no issues and all my important apps are running fine.
  • Charlie
    I detest dock stacks.
    Expected behavior (for me) of a clicked icon on the dock is to open. It now takes me two clicks to open a dock-based folder.
    In addition, I customize my folder icons with client logos, etc. A row of logos sitting on my dock would easily show me which folder belonged to each client. Now, each has the logo of the first file alphabetically with a bunch of stray stuff peeking out behind. How is this useful? Not only is the appearance non-indicative, but it also mutable! This seems to go against every usability guideline written.
  • I also detest the way the icons in a stack overlay each other. However, in your kludge approach, when the stack is expanded, you have an item labeled "a" for the empty folder displayed in your stack. I have come up with another kludge that may be (a little) better than the one you suggested.

    1- First, create a new folder for each of the stacks you wish to create. For example, I have one for CS3, another for Productivity Apps, etc. I put all of these folders inside another folder called "Dock Shortcut Stacks" inside my user folder to keep them neat and tidy.

    2 - Inside each of the new stack folders, create a shortcut for each application you want to put in that stack. For example, my CS3 "stack folder" contains shortcuts for Photoshop, Bridge, Flash, etc. (tip: dragging an app into your stack folder while pressing Command-Option creates a shortcut of the app).

    3 - Select the application shortcut whose icon you want to be the topmost icon for the stack and rename it by inserting a blank space in front of its name. For example, I wanted my CS3 stack to show the Photoshop icon on top, so I renamed the Photoshop shortcut to " Photoshop" (note: don't include the quotation marks. I only put them here to show the space prior to the name.

    4 - Drag each stack folder onto the dock and make sure the stack is sorted by name. The shortcut with the space in front of its name will be the topmost icon.

    Note that this still doesn't get rid of the problem of other icons peeking through from behind your topmost icon. If anyone comes up with a better approach, I'd like to know.

    Cheers.
  • The more time I'm spending with the Stacks I think it would have been nice to have one more option in addition to view as fan or grid: open as folder.

    karlfranz, that is an interesting idea to create a stack full of shortcuts. I might have to try that and see how it goes.
  • The benefit of making a few stacks with shortcuts is that you can reduce the clutter on the dock by limiting the number of icons that normally show. You essentially categorize your dock apps into logical groups that make sense in your workflow.

    The drawback with my approach is that it takes two clicks to get to the program you want to launch instead of just one.

    It's a trade-off either way. The thing that would make it better is if Apple would make a new option when you right-click on a stack that allows you to use the stack's folder icon instead of the icon of some item inside the stack itself.

    The overlapping icons are just nonsense that they should get rid of.
  • Mike W
    I changed my Dock to 2-D, but now my question is if I want to change it back to 3-D, how do I do it?
  • To get the dock back use the terminal and write:

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

    (return)

    killall Dock
  • Larry
    Thanks, I tried the black bar at the top of a desktop photo and it looks great. I knew it would as I had tried the photo of the Earth with Black Background in the Nature folder in System Preferences and noticed how nice the Menu Bar looked with the gray color and black Apple logo. I used Photoshop Elements to add the black bar. My only recommendation was that 22 pixels worked better for me as 20 pixels didn't quite cover it. That was for a 1280 X 800 screen on a MacBook Pro.
  • I’m going to stay to the defaults for now. The address book idea would get old after I awhile, I think.
  • the thing i hate is that shell scripts (ending in .command) do not use their associated icons in stacks. If i enter the directory via finder they have my logo, in stacks its a generic shell icon. I had it temporarily while playing around in /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources (back it up before messing around in there!). I was trying to use clear dock by oscardub, which did not work for me, but during my attempts I found that I got my icons for my shell scripts in stacks. If I can reproduce it I will post how. I ended up succeeding in making my dock clear (which I did by removing all the scurve*.png files and frontline.png in the above mentioned dir)
  • Dean
    how do you revert back to the 3D menu bar? i would like to try this to see how it looks as i think i will like it but need to see it first, also is there any terminal script to make the dot under the opened applications in the dock to a black triangle like in older versions of Mac OS X, reason being i really have to look hard to see what apps are open, it could just be the 3D menu bar.
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