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Old 11-01-2007, 04:06 PM   #1
mark hunte
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Automator to Change Dock Colour in Leopard

Hi all,

Many people seem to want to change the colour of the dock in Leopard.
Doing it manually is a pain.

So I made a Automator workflow that can be saved as an app, that will do all the work for you.

** BEFORE YOU RUN THE WORKFLOW.
I would suggest you back up the png files (see below (do not keep the copies in the Resources Folder, or the script will pick them up also) or make a complete zipped up copy of the Dock.app
I have had no ill effects so far... but it has to be said using this workflow is at you own risk. **


Because the scurve-l.png , scurve-xl.png, scurve-sm.png, scurve-m.png files that need changing are inside the Dock.app /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/
we do not have permissions to change them while they are inside the /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ folder

The workflow will copy the files out to the desktop, (you can change that to you own preference)
(do not change the variable (corePath) which is set to /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/)

A Quartz Composition Filter window will popup.
*Leave the sliders alone.
*Leave the filter on Monochrome. (although I have used gamma to lighten the dock)
Click the colour bar to get to the colour pallet, and select the new colour you want for your dock.
Close the colour pallet. Click continue..

The workflow will change the colour of the copies.

It will now need to copy the files into the restricted

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/

So you will be prompted to enter you Admin details.
Once you do this your dock will quit. Then re launch with the new colour.

I have zipped the workflow and you can download it.
Because it is a workflow you can view it, before you save it as a app, and run it here


I would appreciate any feed back or ideas.
Thanks
Mark
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Last edited by mark hunte; 11-01-2007 at 04:11 PM.
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Old 11-01-2007, 06:52 PM   #2
appleman_design
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works as advertised...thxs
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Old 03-02-2008, 04:24 PM   #3
manu chao
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Does anybody know how to change the annoying semi-translucent black background around the application name you see when you mouse-over any Dock entry?
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Old 03-02-2008, 06:21 PM   #4
mark hunte
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Change it to what?

*not that I can find any file to do with it
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Last edited by mark hunte; 03-02-2008 at 06:37 PM.
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Old 03-03-2008, 05:11 PM   #5
manu chao
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mark hunte
Change it to what?

To transparent, as it was in 10.4 where you only had the the application name in white letters directly above the Dock. Now you have it emphasized by being surrounded with the grey-semitranslucent box and set a bit higher above the Dock. To me, this makes it more distracting, it grabs too much of my attention, I even tend to move my eyes up a bit every every time, away from my click-target, the Dock icon.

In terms of potential images used for this grey-semi-translucent background, I thought all the 'stackbackground...' images might be used, the 'pile...' ones, the 'vvouscorner...', or the 'magic_carpet...' ones.

I've tried replacing the magic_carpet_button_down_right.png, the 'vvouscornertl.png' and the stackbackground-bt.png with images of the same size and being completely transparent. But no luck so far. Maybe there are some caches or what.
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Old 03-05-2008, 08:52 PM   #6
machacker
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Wow, very nice

I made something like this a while ago, ill see if i can dig it up.
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