Mac OS X

Customizing the color and icons in the Dock

So I had a request that involved something I had never actually thought or bothered to do: customize the finder icon in the dock…  I figured it would just be an image and therefore that it couldn’t actually be that difficult.  And I was correct.  Remarkably, the icon is actually called finder.png (you may have noticed that smaller iPhone and OS X images are almost always png files these days):

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

So I renamed it to finder.old using this command:
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/finder.png
 /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/finder.OLD
Then grabbed a new png icon and threw it in the same place with the same name (in this case the logo was called UGA.png before and was on my desktop):
sudo mv ~/Desktop/UGA.png /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/finder.png
Then I restarted the Finder.  Well, no love – the icon didn’t replace the one in my dock.  So I restarted my dock.  Still no love.  So I restarted my computer.  Viola, as you can see below, it worked like a charm!
Custom Finder Icon in Dock
Custom Finder Icon in Dock

Next, I decided to start looking at what else I could do in here.  First, the background of the dock.  There are scurve-m.png, scurve-sm.png, scruve-xl.png and scurve-l.png.  As you resize your dock it will replace these pictures as needed.  So, if you take one, edit it (in this case I made mine black with 10% transparency) then it will change the color of the dock next time you restart, or use the following command:

killall Dock

Changing the Color of the Dock
Changing the Color of the Dock

Additionally, there’s the trash icons trashempty.png and trashfull.png and the Dashboard.png files.  You’ll also notice some files starting with the word indicator – these are the little lights that appear under an icon when the application that the icon represents is open.  I think these are perfect as-is, so I didn’t bother to customize them.  There’s also a bunch of other images in here, like the ones that create the background you see when you hover over an icon and the ones that generate the QuickLook views.  

Finally, I was going to make a little application to allow you to change all this stuff around.  But, it turns out that the uber-smart cats at Panic (makers of Transmit) beat me to the punch with Candy Bar.