What's up, Dock? Give your Dock a little class with Dock Library

Let's face it; the Mac OS X Dock is pretty boring. I mean, other than the little glowing blue LED underneath active applications that a lot of people can't see anyway, it's just a boring, opaque white reflective shelf. Wouldn't you like to add some excitement to it?

Well, you still can't relive the glory of your high school athletic prowess and put that dusty third-place trophy for shot-put on the shelf, but you can make the Dock look nicer with Dock Library. It's a shareware application from Dative Studios that enables quick switching of your Dock styles. TUAW covered this little application in 2008, but we have a lot of new readers who may not be aware of how Dock Library works.

Dock Library doesn't come with a bunch of built-in styles; for those, you need to go to sites such as LeopardDocks.com or LeopardDocks.net, both of which have a variety of free Dock templates ranging from the commonplace to the absurd.

After installing Dock Library, I chose the nice "Coffee Table Rounded" Dock design (see below), which looks like beautifully finished wood and has rounded corners. What's really nice is that those blue LEDs really show up under my active applications now, and that Dock Library works with Mac OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard with no issues.

I'm curious to find out what bizarre or cool Dock templates our readers would like to see — your ideas might be just the thing to stimulate some creative designer to submit a new template to the LeopardDocks sites. Leave your comments below.

[via Download Squad and Sizlopedia]