Anyone else have the same issue? With the light-colored dock in 10.9, it's really hard to see what apps are running and which are not. Very annoying. Any known fixes, any skins that can be used to change the dock color? Seems an obvious issue... Apple should fix this.
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Dock: Hard to Tell Which Apps Are Open
- Thread starter maxclimber1w
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Yeah, you can change the dock to black and also change the indicators. Download dockmod.
Then go leoparddocks.com and download a dock, get the indicators files and then you'll have to put them in /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/
Rename the old files to something intelligible, then name the new ones exactly how the old ones were spelled out. Done.
This helped for me. It made the indicator lights more obvious:
http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/15/enable-transparent-dock-os-x/
http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/15/enable-transparent-dock-os-x/
If you want to buy DockMod then you can skin the dock pretty much any way you want (you can do this with the free version, but you have to re-enable it every hour which is a pain). The developer has also said he's working on modding the side dock, not just the bottom dock, and I think he's also adding the option to change the color of the indicator lights.
You can also just take the original indicator lights and change their color using any photo editing program (or even Preview). That way you can make them whatever color you want.
Why do you need to know which apps are running? Properly coded apps consume no CPU cycles when they are not actively being used and are removed from RAM if the space is needed. Apple has been slowly reducing the visibility of indicators over the last few OS versions besides allowing turning the indicators completely off. (Quite possibly the default on new systems.)