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
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
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.
