Customizing the Dock

For Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)

Warning: This article involves editing system files. Neither IheartNY and Xicons are not responsible for any damage you may cause to your system. If you follow these instructions, you do so at your own risk.

The Finder and Trash Can icons that you see in the Dock are located inside the Dock.app application package. To change these hard-coded icons, you will need to edit the PNG files contained within Dock.app's application package.

From within the Finder, choose "Go: Go to Folder..." from the menu, or press command-shift-g. Enter the following path and click the "Go" button or press return.

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

This will bring up a Finder window which contains, among other things, the icons used by the Dock. Before editing any of icons in this directory, I strongly recommend you back them up. The Finder will not let you create a new folder in this directory because you do not have the necessary access priviledges (this directory is owned by root). Instead, create a new folder in a safe place such as your Home directory and drag copies of each of the .png and .icns files into it. These files can then be used to revert to the original icons in the future. Please do not email me asking for copies of the original icons. I cannot give them to you.

Below is a listing of files you may be interested in editing (and backing up):

finder.png

trashfull.png

trashempty.png

url.png

notfound.png

To make changes to one of these files, drag a copy to the Desktop and then open it in Adobe Photoshop. Find and download a replacement icon at Xicons.com. Open the desired replacement using Iconographer and choose Edit: Copy: Icon and Mask from the menu (or press command-shift-c).

Switch back to the .png file you are editing in Adobe Photoshop. Choose "Select: All" from the menu (or press command-a). Now press the delete button to remove the existing icon. Finally, choose "Edit: Paste" from the menu (or press command-v) and save the file.

Repeat the above steps until you have edited all the .png files you wish to change

If you receive an error stating that you do not have permission to save the file, it is likely because you are working with the file in the /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ directory. Instead, you should be working on the copy you dragged to your desktop.

In order for the changes you made to take effect, you will need to replace the originals found in /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ with the updated ones on your desktop. Drag the .png files from your desktop back into the /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ Finder window.

A dialog box should pop up telling you that the "Resources" folder cannot be modified. Click on the "Authenticate" button. A standard Finder copy dialog will appear asking if you would like to overwrite the files in the "Resources" directory. Click on the "Apply to all" checkbox (if there is one) and then press the "Replace" button. You did backup these files, right? ;-)

When prompted, enter your password (Admin account required) and click "OK".

Your updated icons are now installed in the Dock application. All you need to do now is flush the Dock's icon cache and relaunch the Dock.

From the Finder select Go: Go To Folder... from the menu (or type command-shift-g) again and enter the following path:

/Library/Caches/

Delete any files whose name begins with "com.apple.dock.iconcache." and then restart the Dock. This can be done simply by logging out and logging back into your account. If you are comfortable with the Terminal, you could send a kill signal to the Dock process and let it automatically relaunch.

The icons you altered should now be updated in the Dock. Congratulations!

To return to the defaults, simply replace the .png files in the /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ directory with your backups, in the same manner as you just did above. Flush the cache and relaunch the Dock and everything should be back to normal.

As you may have noticed, there are additional resources inside of Dock.app that are worth changing, notably the Dock poof. Additional customizations are left as an exercise for the reader.

This article was written by Matthew Bice for Xicons.com