Change the Look of the Dock

I really dislike the new appearance of the Dock in Leopard -- the new 3D low-contrast glassy appearance. From what I hear, this was a matter of bitter debate at Apple, and that's good, because there's a built-in way to change it.

You may have noticed that the Dock changes when it's on the side of the screen. I like that appearance much better. It has better contrast and a much cleaner look, so I can recognize the icons more quickly.

You can get the dock-at-the-side appearance all the time by setting a preference from the command-line.

mike$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
mike$ killall Dock

Enjoy.


p.s.

Hey, SJ, if you're listening ... this choice belongs in the preference pane for the Dock, so that users who want (or need) higher contrast in the Dock could more easily improve their Mac OS X experience.