MacMost Now 7: Customizing the Dock

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.