- Disctop Customization
Disctop was originally made to bring some fun to your Mac. Now you can have even more fun by learning you how to customize Disctop with your own 'CD' image in this tutorial. Be inspired by what you can do, and take a look at the examples in the gallery on the right.
- 1 - WARNING!
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Customization of the original CD image affects Disctop for ALL users! So backup your cd.tif file before you replace it with your own. The CD image is also downloadable, but it would save you another visit to our website.
- 2 - Download
Download our example Photoshop file of the original CD. Note that the end result should be a tiff file of 450x450 pixels at 72dpi. For your own custom TIFF image, use the Photoshop template file and save your image with the following settings: in the TIFF Options screen select LZW compression, byte order doesn't matter, Save Transparency, and Discard Layers, and Save as a Copy.
- 3 - Turn off Disctop
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Turn off Disctop in the preference pane of your System Preferences. A CD or DVD present in your drive doesn't have to be removed.
- 4 - Locate the Disctop Preference Pane
The original image file Disctop uses for the CD background is located in the package of the Disctop_Daemon, which in turn can be found inside the package of the Disctop preference pane. To get access to the Daemon, you first have to locate the Disctop Preference pane, which depending on the installation (single user or all users), is located at either YourHomeDirectory/Library/PreferencePanes/Disctop.prefPane or YourSystemDisk/Library/PreferencePanes/Disctop.prefPane- 5 - Remove/Rename the original image file
- Control click on Disctop.prefPane and choose Open package contents. The Disctop_Daemon is located in the Contents/Resources folder. Again control click and choose 'Open package contents'. Now you scroll through the Contents and Resources folders again and locate the cd.tif file. Remove or rename the file.
- 5 - Rename & Copy your custom image
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Locate your downloaded/saved custom image files and rename the file to cd.tif, then move/copy it into the Resources folder where you just removed your original cd.tif file.
- 6 - Turn on Disctop
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Turn Disctop back on in the Preference pane of your System Preferences.
- 7 - Watch the result
Insert a CD or DVD in your optical drive (OF COURSE: DO NOT TRY THIS WITH A REAL LP OR 3.5 INCH DISK ;-) and have a look at your custom created image as it slides into your screen.- Tip:
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Images that are bigger/smaller than 450x450 pixels will not show up bigger/smaller than 450x450. The image will be scaled by Disctop. If you want to create a smaller image because the current one is too big, then make a 450x450 pixel transparent tiff file, paste a small image representing the CD on top, and leave the rest transparent.
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