November 4, 2007 at 2:54 pm
I installed Apple’s latest version of OS X, version 10.5 or “Leopard” last week. I’ll sideline the oh-so-popular debate about questionable UI changes in Leopard, and instead post quick ‘fixes’ I found regarding two things I wasn’t a fan of:
Change OS X Dock for Leopard
Not a fan of the new 3d dock? Try a 2d dock that is available but unfortunately not exposed as an option. Here’s all you need to do:
- Open the Terminal application located in your Applications > Utilities folder
- Type:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
The first line requests that a 2d rendition of the Dock be used. The second line terminates and then restarts all instances of the Dock.
Change Leopard’s Translucent Menu Bar
The Apple hacking community has yet to find a quick Terminal command to revert to an opaque Menu Bar. What can be done is a quick modification to your Desktop Wallpaper which will achieve the same effect. Some have scoffed at this method. My take? It’s clever and easy: thumbs up.
Tags:How To, Leopard, OS X, Software, Support, Tips, Undocumented Feature, Usability, User InterfaceShare This
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Jason wrote @ November 5th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Yeah, the ’shelf’ is crazy annoying. I saw these today, and wanted to pass them along. The first is my favorite:
http://daniel.fallman.org/glassdock.html
http://www.elgebar.com/dockcolor.html
http://www.leoparddocks.com/
GO wrote @ November 7th, 2007 at 12:48 am
maybe a stupid question, but…
after executing :
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
ever if I want to revert, will
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
simply work?
In my Leopard experience, I have no problem with the glassy interface of the dock, but I hate the shadows behind the icons. Besides I’m on a G4 Mac-mini, and with Leopard the dock animation is kinda flickery and sloooow - I blame it on the shadows (& besides, I no longer recognize or perceive easily some of my app icons) . If anything else could be done to make it work faster, I’d appreciate it.
How to revert is actually not a stupid question to ask at all. The answer: yes, you can revert the dock to the Leopard style by substituting the ‘YES’ with a ‘NO’ and then running the ‘killall Dock’ command.
Jason wrote @ November 7th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Yeah, I was not really thinking when I tried to revert. I first removed the ‘no-’ from glass, until I read the line correctly, and realized it should be NO instead of YES.
