Posted by Gary Rosenzweig on 12/5/07.
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Gary Rosenzweig talks to artist William Follett about how to create a custom Leopard Dock with custom icons. They use Candy Bar from Panic (http://panic.com/candybar) , and icons from IconFactory (http://iconfactory.com).
Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi. This is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now and today I have with me artist William Follett.
William Follett:Hey everybody.
Rosenzweig: And Will’s going to show us something really cool on his laptop. What have you got for us?
Follett: I don’t know if I’d describe it as really cool. It might be really geeky and it’s a great way to get an eye roll from your wife.
Rosenzweig: Well it looks great. You’ve customized your dock in icons.
Follett: Look at that dock! It’s a little blue dock! How did I do that?
Rosenzweig: That is pretty cool. So how did you do that?
Follett: There’s two ways I know how to do this. There’s a slightly harder way and a really, really easy way. The slightly harder way is you produce four PNG’s for your dock, there’s a small, a medium, a large and an extra large and that covers your different screen resolutions. You find the folder on your hard drive and you drag them in and it just takes a long time because there’s a lot of restarting and who wants to wait for that? Now, the really, really easy way is to use this great program I found called Candy Bar.
Rosenzweig: Candy Bar? All right. Where do you get that at?
Follett: You can find it at panic.com/candybar. This is how easy it is to use. My four graphics here and just drag them in…
Rosenzweig: …drag them in there. Or I can see you can actually create all the backgrounds from that first graphic. Awesome.
Follett: Where was I? It’s drag and drop. This is the sign of what I think is a great program is the fact that I didn’t have to check the instructions to learn how to do this.
Rosenzweig: No. It’s the Mac way — you just drag and drop.
Follett: It’s the Mac way. So I have my graphics in there. So I hit a button called apply dock. I relaunch it. It’s going to ask me permission. It didn’t ask permission that time because I just did it. And look at that dock. Now it’s this cool glass, shiny glass dock.
Rosenzweig: Awesome. That is really cool. And you just created those graphics easily. Now suppose you’re not an artist and you want to actually go ahead and customize your dock. Is there a place you can go to get some cool graphics?
Follett: There is. There’s a site called iconfactory.com and they have multiple collections, more than I could count of icons that you can put on your Mac. They also have Windows icons if you’re into that. They’re expanding their collection of docks; every week they seem to add a new one. I think Futurama was this week.
Rosenzweig That’s really cool. Mac users love to customize their Macs, so yeah, why not? And I love the fact that for a time machine your icon is a TARDIS. Awesome. So for MacMost Now this is Gary Rosenzweig and artist William Follett.
Hi. This is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now and today I have with me artist William Follett.
William Follett:Hey everybody.
Rosenzweig: And Will’s going to show us something really cool on his laptop. What have you got for us?
Follett: I don’t know if I’d describe it as really cool. It might be really geeky and it’s a great way to get an eye roll from your wife.
Rosenzweig: Well it looks great. You’ve customized your dock in icons.
Follett: Look at that dock! It’s a little blue dock! How did I do that?
Rosenzweig: That is pretty cool. So how did you do that?
Follett: There’s two ways I know how to do this. There’s a slightly harder way and a really, really easy way. The slightly harder way is you produce four PNG’s for your dock, there’s a small, a medium, a large and an extra large and that covers your different screen resolutions. You find the folder on your hard drive and you drag them in and it just takes a long time because there’s a lot of restarting and who wants to wait for that? Now, the really, really easy way is to use this great program I found called Candy Bar.
Rosenzweig: Candy Bar? All right. Where do you get that at?
Follett: You can find it at panic.com/candybar. This is how easy it is to use. My four graphics here and just drag them in…
Rosenzweig: …drag them in there. Or I can see you can actually create all the backgrounds from that first graphic. Awesome.
Follett: Where was I? It’s drag and drop. This is the sign of what I think is a great program is the fact that I didn’t have to check the instructions to learn how to do this.
Rosenzweig: No. It’s the Mac way — you just drag and drop.
Follett: It’s the Mac way. So I have my graphics in there. So I hit a button called apply dock. I relaunch it. It’s going to ask me permission. It didn’t ask permission that time because I just did it. And look at that dock. Now it’s this cool glass, shiny glass dock.
Rosenzweig: Awesome. That is really cool. And you just created those graphics easily. Now suppose you’re not an artist and you want to actually go ahead and customize your dock. Is there a place you can go to get some cool graphics?
Follett: There is. There’s a site called iconfactory.com and they have multiple collections, more than I could count of icons that you can put on your Mac. They also have Windows icons if you’re into that. They’re expanding their collection of docks; every week they seem to add a new one. I think Futurama was this week.
Rosenzweig That’s really cool. Mac users love to customize their Macs, so yeah, why not? And I love the fact that for a time machine your icon is a TARDIS. Awesome. So for MacMost Now this is Gary Rosenzweig and artist William Follett.
