14 DAY TRIAL // Although there are many programs that change the appearance of your Mac out there, and many collections of icons and desktop images and mouse cursors, people's docks usually stay the same. TransparentDock is a little application that wants to put a stop to that old dock you've been seeing since forever and lets you customize it the way you want it.
Before installing this I never had any real idea of how many design elements there are in the dock, and how many different looks can be achieved by playing with them.
Custom Dock First up, we can change the dock background color and opacity. Although the program offers a lot of color in its pull down menu, one cannot help but feel that a color picker would have been much better. Furthermore, the color menu has no preview, only the names of colors which is a pain since applying changes can take quite a while sometimes. The opacity slider lets you set how transparent you want most of the dock to be; at full transparency only the outline remains which gives it a very nice, minimalistic look.
The second thing we can change is the dock outline. Once again we are greeted by the color menu and a transparency slider. If you think your previous experience when changing colors for the dock background gives you a good idea of how those colors will look on the outline, think again. Because it has such a small color area, the colors look very differently on the outline, also they can be influenced by the color of the background. Turning the opacity down can give you a totally invisible dock, with only the icons showing. This is a very strange sensation... hard to imagine how different the dock feels with nothing but icons.
Next up you can change the color of the Application Triangles. Besides the usual colors this menu has two new additions, Xaqua and Transparent. Choosing transparent totally hides the little triangles, giving you a much cleaner dock look. On the other hand, whenever I glance at my dock I have the strange sensation that nothing is running. If nothing else, this application has showed me how deep rooted inside my mind the OS X dock has become.
If you so desire you can choose a custom Poof Effect. In case you're wondering, the Poof effect is that little cloud that appears whenever you remove something from the dock.
Dock Effects In case you have never tweaked the position of your dock with another application, you can do so here. You can choose the side of the screen and the pining position for the dock as well as the minimizing effect. Other options are transparent icons for hidden applications and a dock drop-shadow, shadow option which I have seen in every tweak tool but whose effects have never really registered with me.
What's new here is the ability to change the font size, and the 'maximize minimized windows thumbnails' which is a strange option that only shows you a very large upper left corner of that minimized window... rather pointless.
Dock Setup Here you can set a lot of advanced options such as the window depth level of the dock and the moving or removal of the Finder icon. If you do 'technical stuff' with your mac, you can toggle the visibility of background only with applications such as "loginwindow","SystemUIServer". This option is useless to the vast majority of users and potentially dangerous since it lets you interact with core system elements you shouldn't be messing with unless you know what you're doing.
If you share a computer with someone else and they are constantly rearranging your dock, you can lock dock icons in place, but be warned that this also prevents the adding of new icons.
Single application mode might be very useful to some. In essence, when you change the current application using the dock, it will hide all other application except the currently selected one. This would have been a superb feature if it were possible to add certain applications to a exclude list.
Other niceties include a big button for activating Expose that can be placed anywhere you like.
The Good Offers many ways of customizing your dock that are not available in many of the theme programs that most people use.
The Bad Hardly any real information on what you are doing. There is no preview to the colors and half the time you are changing things blindly and then applying to see what comes out. Really needs a preview of some sort.
The Truth This application lets you change the dock in ways that are simply not possible otherwise. Yes it does take a while to get everything the way you want it. But on the plus side, you only need to do it once.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
