HOW TO: Hack Leopard

Apple's latest Mac OS X release, 10.5 -- Leopard, has been well received overall. But a growing number of users are hacking the interface to make it feel a little bit more Tiger-like.

The prevailing sentiment from these users seems to be: "it wasn't broke in Tiger before, so why "fix" it in Leopard?"

The most radical UI changes in Leopard -- the new 3D dock and the transparent menu bar -- are the ones that are coming under the most criticism.

Help is on its way in the form of a number of different hacks produced by the community that can help you transform parts of your Leopard back into a Tiger.

Change the Dock
If you just can't stand the 3D appearance of the dock you have a number of options. If you're not into hacking then simply moving the dock to the right or left-hand side of the screen will change its appearance to a more subdued 2D style.

However, if you'd like the 2D dock on the bottom of the screen simply enter the following into a Terminal window:

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

To reverse it simply type NO instead of YES.

For those that don't like using Terminal, a third party app calledDockswitcher is available that does the same thing. If that's not enough Dock-hacking for one day, check out this forum which describes in detail how to change everything from the 3D background to the 'active' application indicator.

A cleaner, 2D Dock

Opaque Menubar

If your gripe is with the translucent menu bar, check out OpaqueMenuBar. This little app lets you make the menu bar non-transparent again - just like the good-old days!

Ironically, according to this Apple document, older Macs may not be able to display the translucent menu. As John Gruber puts it, 'you get a better-looking menu bar with a crappier video card.'

iChat Effects

Lastly, remember the Star Wars style iChat Hologram effect that was previewed at WWDC? For some reason it didn't ship with Leopard, but according to TUAW you can get it back by downloading this file and putting it into your /Library/Compositions folder and restarting iChat.

With Leopard only two weeks old I'm sure more hacks are on the way. If you've found any good ones let us know in the comments.