Tag Archives: Dock

Quick Mac Tip: Fix missing background on second display

At work, I plug my 11-inch MacBook Air into a 23-inch LCD, which I use as my primary screen, with the Mac’s display as a secondary screen. Frequently, due to some combination of not closing it then unplugging the Mini DisplayPort plug in the proper order, or… something… I will find that when I open up my computer the next day, my desktop background (a.k.a. “wallpaper” for recent Windows switchers) on the MacBook Air is gone, replaced with a far-too-bright light gray generic background. Yuck!

Previously I had resorted to logging out and back in, or even rebooting, to fix this problem, but yesterday I searched and found an answer. It’s really simple! But it does require opening Terminal.

Go into Applications > Utilities and open Terminal. Then at the command prompt, type this (and, of course, hit Return):

killall Dock

That’s it! The Dock will quit and automatically restart, and the desktop will be restored!

Removing the Leopard Dock’s “shininess”

I know there were already dozens of blog entries the day after Leopard “dropped” with instructions on how to remove the shiny Dock, but I’ve actually been living with it peacefully and almost liking it.

But now at my new job, I’m not sure if it’s the saturated color on my iMac display, the particular desktop image I’m using, or some strange combination of those and other factors, but the Dock’s reflection was painfully (yes, painfully) shiny and distracting, so I just had to look up how to get rid of it.

Apparently there’s a whole cottage industry now around customizing the Leopard Dock’s appearance, but all I really wanted was the simple look you get when you have the Dock on the left or right side, but when the Dock is resting nicely on the bottom where it belongs. It was surprisingly difficult (in that I had to do three whole searches and then hunt through a few links on the first page of results of each) before I found (again) the simple command line instructions to accomplish this task. And in the interest of saving myself the trouble next time (if there is a next time), I’m posting them here:

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