CandyBar Gives New Look To Icons, Leopard’s Dock.

What? You’re bored with Leopard already? You can’t wait to find ways to customize Leopard’s look? Stop.

Now grab a CandyBar and start your customization efforts with icons, then make Leopard’s Dock look as good as you really want it to be.

I’m a child of the personal computer revolution. Since the Mac is arguably the father of true personalized computing (remember-- the Mac has a personality, Windows is a Borg-like machine which needs constant regeneration), customization is allowed.

True, Apple doesn’t seem to like customization efforts and doesn’t give Mac users much to alter. Perhaps Steve Jobs sees the Mac as a work of art which should not be trifled with, its purity left undisturbed. Whatever.

In memory of Eric Burdon and the Animals, sing along with me, ”It’s my Mac and I’ll do what I want.”

If you love those big, colorful icons in Mac OS X, you’re going to love what Panic has done with CandyBar 3. Leopard users rejoice. Big, beautiful, freak out icons have arrived at the gates of the latest Mac OS, and they’re drag and drop simple.

Messing with system icons on OS X Tiger was not child’s play, sufficiently difficult that I didn’t dink around with them as we Mac users could in OS versions of Mac Christmases Past.

Quick Look in Leopard also means big, huge, giant icons-- 512 by 512 pixels big. Anything that big is ripe for customization. Enter CandyBar 3, Pixadex, and the IconFactory.

The latest CandyBar combines with Pixadex to modify Leopard’s icons and organize all the icons in your collection. What? You don’t have 439 icons stored on your Mac? Now there’s a reason. With CandyBar you can actually use those huge icons from the IconFactory and elsewhere.

CandyBar doesn’t mess with Leopard and doesn’t hack anything that could cause a problem later. The magic is simple. CandyBar replaces the icon and graphic files that Leopard stores on your Mac. Don’t like the change? No problem. CandyBar restores the original icons, and your Mac is back to normal.

In the meantime, open CandyBar, browse through the icons on your Mac, and simply drag and drop icons to change old icons to new icons. With CandyBar you can apply new icons to folders on Leopard, even customize the Dock.

Double click CandyBar and it goes into action by searching Leopard for all the icons on your Mac and placing them in a familiar interface that’s drag and drop friendly. The top right window holds all the icons on your Mac. The bottom right window holds new icon sets. Drag new into old. Done. Don’t like it? Drag old out and the original icon is restored.

CandyBar’s Tool Bar is in an odd location to the left under the heading of change. The first button lets you change system icons. The second button changes application icons. The third button changes Dock elements and backgrounds. The fourth button changes volume icons.

For example, the icon for Time Machine is too close in style and color to the networked volume icon of another Mac.

Change it. Just drag an icon you like over the Time Machine icon and click the Apply Icons button.

Don’t like that generic embossed icon in Leopard’s folders? Change it. Select the icon you want, drag the folder to the Quick Drop. Done. Folder icon is changed. It’s that easy.

CandyBar comes with a set of icons ready to change out. That’s called an iContainer. To install, just double click. Change out all the icons in Leopard or just those you want. Even more icons and Dock styles can be pulled down from the IconFactory.

Never was changing icons so easy and so safe. Your mileage may vary, of course. With Leopard I see a whole cottage industry of customization taking place for Mac users, beyond anything we’ve seen from Apple in decades past. Icons and Docks.

Leopard has been cleaned up and polished and offers an arguable improvement over the mish mash of Tiger and Panther. Do you plan to customize the Dock or Leopard’s icons? Or, leave your Mac stock, clean, pure, untouched? Talk Back to Mac360 in the Comments section below.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

Off Topic #6 - The MacHeist is back. In case you missed it a few months ago, MacHeist is a great way for Mac users to get 12 top Mac applications and utilities for $49. Many of these have been reviewed on Mac360, so we highly recommend that you take a look. The value, what you get for what you pay, is remarkable. Click Here to look, buy, download.

Off Topic #72 - Need to save a few dollars on Mac software? Click Here to save almost $10 on the new version of Photoshop Elements, and almost $20 on the new Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac from the Mac360 Store (it’s really Amazon). Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage and more-- barely $50 more than Apple’s iWork ‘08.