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Top 5 Favourite Leopard Docks (so far!)

It didn’t take long for people to work out how to mod the new dock in Leopard, and there’s already a few custom dock sites out there. However, I’ve seen a lot of pretty mediocre docks, and it seems most sites are just accepting any dock thrown their way, so I figured I would share a couple of my absolute favourites so far. Some of these I found at the bigger Leopard dock sites such as leoparddocks.net/.com and others at general customization sites and forums like macthemes2.

1. Niqu Dock (3D) by esXXI - original post/link

This is currently my dock of choice. It just looks great. The indicators are clear, the shape is great and overall it’s just very clean and unobtrusive. The reflection looks nice but isn’t over-done which is a big problem with a lot of custom docks.

2. Niqu Dock (2D) by esXXI - original post/link

Yep, esXXI’s Niqu dock comes in 2D as well. So far there aren’t a lot of 2D dock mods so I think it deserves a special mention, but either way it really does look awesome. I used this for a while before finally switching back to 3D for pretty-shiny. It rocks.

3. Dark Glass by revmitcz - original post/link

The first dock mod I tried, and still easily one of the nicest. Just nice. 

4.  Rounded Reflection by Noel - link

I usually tend to think darker docks look nicer, but this one caught my eye and I had to try it. A little more busy than the others so far, but a definite improvement on the default dock. I really like the amount of transparency and the colour, and the indicators are extremely clear. Pretty!

5.  Blue Aurora by James Magahern - link

Another non-black dock. This caught my eye because there are barely any docks that aren’t dark or near-default that look this nice. It looks much better on solid backgrounds (especially light grey backgrounds), but I figured I’d keep it consistent with the preview. If you use a background that’s a bit more solid, or lighter, definitely give it a try.

Other notable mentions: Ivory Dock by Lokheed - here. 3D Border by Justin - here. Excellent replacement dividers and indicators by mrmark - here.

Enjoy!

- s. 

(digg) 

Stacks Overlays

Update #2: The original links for the icons are down, so grab them at the new link here. 

Update: Apparently the drawer icon zip files have now been updated to be pre-modified by touch, so all you should need to do now is drop them in the folder of the stack you want the drawer to represent. Optica Optima have also made some more drawer icons for us, including drawers for System, iDisk, AirDisk, Fonts, Aliases, Favourites and a bunch of others. Check them out here and download them here.

Stacks is pretty much Leopard’s only non-eyecandy change to the dock, and it had the potential to be pretty handy, but the fact that the icon representing the stack is whatever the top file in the folder happens to be really ruins it (for me at least). However, if you haven’t yet given up on stacks and thrown them off your dock, there is a solution: overlaying stacks icons.

In essence, these are just small-ish semi-transparent icons that are permanently our top icon. This picture explains it best (before & after):

Original post & creators of icons: here (Japanese, hence my post)

Download link: here 

Now, to get the icons to stay on top of our stacks is a little tricky. First we obviously need to put the icons into the stacks folder(s). We could name the icon 0.app and sort by name to keep them up top, but this isn’t really practical for the Downloads stack, so we’re going to change the access modified date using the unix command touch. So open up Terminal and follow this example, replacing the location and name of the icon where neccessary.

	cd ~/Downloads 	

	touch -mt 202001010101.01 " Downloads "

This will change the date modified of the icon to 1st January, 2020. Obviously you’ll need to change ” Downloads ” to whatever the folder/icon is named. The example is with the downloads stack but you can do it for any of them. Now just make sure your stack is sorting by date modified (ctrl-click/right-click the stack and Sort by:). Repeat for other stacks and enjoy.

For stacks like Documents and Applications, it’s better to sort by name. The icon folders come with spaces in the beginning so they should be on top when sorted by name automatically. 

If you know of any other stack overlay icons out there, let me know. All credit for these icons goes to Optica-Optima.