Tweak Exposé Glow

Tweak Exposé Glow

For Snow Leopard Users

If you have noticed, whenever you press F9 key to activate Exposé, you will see a rather different Exposé from Mac OS X Leopard. And upon mouse over on one of the item, you can see blue glowing effect.

Today, we are going to bring you to tweak on the glow color to your liking.

Step 1. Find the Image Sprites

Most of the time, the items that can be seen (let it buttons, icons, or other items) are located in the System folder of our Mac. The glowing effect of our Exposé is also using the image sprite stored in the System folder.

Here is the quick step to the directory containing the image sprites:

1. Open Finder and hit keystrokes Cmd-Shift-G
2. Type in the directory address: /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources
3. Then, hit enter to quickly jump to that directory (Resources folder)

Step 2. Move Them to Other Place

As you are now inside the System folder, the permission setting will stop you from making any direct changes to the files inside.

The workaround for this is to copy these two items to other place outside System folder, modify them, and move them back.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Inside the folder, search for two image files, namely: expose-window-selection-big.png and expose-window-selection-small.png
2. Copy these two items somewhere else. And delete the original copy from this Resources folder
3. Now open these two images with your favorite image editor (e.g. Preview, Pixelmator, or Photoshop), change the color, and then save the changes
4. Move back these two images into your the same directory as before (Resources folder)

Step 3. Restart Exposé to the Effect

Finally to see the changes, you need to open Terminal and execute command line:

killall Dock

The above command line will restart the Dock for you as well as restart Exposé. After restarting the Exposé, you can now see the change in glow color after the modification.

The key to quickly do this tweak is to open several Finder windows. This will save your time from going through the whole process to search for Resources folder.

And, it's always recommended to make a backup for these two image files. Enjoy the tweaking