Create your own Dock for Mac

Written by Vivian in Tutorials Mac

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To make your own dock for Mac, is not a complicated thing at all, if you have some basic notions of digital design ; and if you don’t, you can even mix & match several elements from different Docks.

First, let’s dig into the Dock and list the files that compose it (you will find the pixel size in the parenthesis) :

• The 3 sizes of the indicators according to scaling, indicator_large.png (42×14) , indicator_medium.png (30×11) et indicator_small.png (14×8).
• The Dock’s background and its 4 different sizes scurve-xl.png (1280×86), scurve-l.png (1280×98), scurve-m.png (1280×128) et scurve-sm.png (900×128).
• The small edge in front of the Dock or frontline, frontline.png (790×3).
• And finally the Dock separator, separator.png (64×128).

Don’t even bother with 3D effect of the Dock, Leopard ( and of course Snow Leopard) will handle it for you . As you can see below all the files are done in plain 2D, no need to add any special effect to it.

Once you have all the files.

You have the possibility to create all the files yourself and then, put them together in an icontainer or in dockSD3.

Regarding the icontainer format you will need to use CandyBar. To save your new dock in CandyBar, create a new collection by clicking on the “+” sign in the bottom left corner, then click on the button located on the left side of the search bar on the bottom, and finally click on “Add this dock”. Last step, drag your new collection to your desktop to show your icontainer file that includes your new dock.

It’s even easier with dockSD3, put all your separate files under one folder and add the extension .dockSD3 to this folder. You can also create a dock in SuperDocker , just go to Dock and customize your dock, then just drag and drop your files on the dock image.

You can also mix and match several docks (for example adding the separator of one with the indicators of another). Or don’t use packaging and use your resources to change you dock manually.
Go to System/Library/Core Services/Dock.app/, right clic and select “Show Package Contents”. Then, go to /Contents/Resources/ and replace the resources with your new ones. Be careful and save the old Dock.app!
Finally, you need to reboot the dock. Open the Terminal and write killall Dock.

If you have any question, don’t hesitate to contact us !