Get Rid of the Ugly Dock
With Mac OS X 10.5, the new look of the dock makes it hard to see what programs are open, however you can get a nice high contrast dock if you place it to the sides of the screen instead of at the bottom. But, if you’re like me, you prefer the dock at the bottom of the screen.
To get the look of the side dock at the bottom, open up terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
then type
killall Dock
If you want the low contrast dock back, repeat the above, replacing YES with NO.