Mac OS X Leopard introduced a (literally) shiny, new Dock. Duringle’s high-skueomorphic era, icons were essentially placed on a reflective 3d glass table.
Not everyone loved this look, but — being a *nix based system — it was easy enough to set some system flags and replace the images used. That was enough need to inspire a community of UI skinning projects.
I built and packaged an to make skinning the Dock drag-n-drop simple, while some friends made an online gallery of Dock skins called Dockulicious.
