I know a lot of you are not a fan of the 3D dock, however I love it. One thing that was bugging me was that little curve that was in it. It seemed so unnecessary and I felt made the dock look a little too busy. In trying to see if I could remove it, I found out that whole background is one PNG image.

The image is found here: /System » Library » CoreServices » Dock. Control-clik on the Dock file and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Once inside the dock's package contents, you need to go into the Resources folder. There is a bit of an unknown here: The dock's background image is called scurve.png, and if you're doing this as you read, you'll see there are several scurve files. The one that worked on my system was scurve-l.png. You may have to try some of the other scurve files (they range from sm to xl) to get this to work.

Copy scurve-l.png and place it somewhere so you know where it is and can edit it. I made a second copy of this as well, because you will have to replace the one in the package, and I wanted an original just in case. Fire up your favorite image editor that supports layer opacity. The reflection in the dock is actually a layer below the image you are editing, so the amount of opacity you set your image to in the image editor will determine how reflective your dock is when your all said and done.

Now you get to do your magic in Photoshop or whatever it is you are using. I just changed mine to a solid black, and set the opacity to 70%, and saved it as a png. Any name for this file will do. I then dragged the saved png file to the Finder window I opened earlier. You want to place your new file into the same Resources folder as where the original resides. You will have to authenticate to tell the system that you are sure you want to put this new file in there.

Once you have your file where it needs to be, you'll need to fire up Terminal. Navigate to the Resources directory I mentioned earlier. In my case, I named my new dock file scurve-black.png, so I had to type in:

sudo mv scurve-black.png scurve-l.png

The general form of the command is sudo mv newFile oldFile. To see the fruit of your labor, you'll have to restart your dock. Logging out should do it, or just "Force Quit" it from the activity monitor, or use killall Dock in Terminal.

[robg adds: Reader Marius_Th also sent in a tip on this, and he included a shot of his colorized dock; here's a segment of his, or click it to view the full version:


He also points out that you can change the left/right separator by modifying the various separator PNG files in the Resources folder.]