Rui CarmoThe Mac OS X dock is one of those things you either love or hate. Nevertheless, it is being relentlessly cloned in many other platforms and desktop environments.
Those not liking the 3D look in the Leopard Dock can simply do:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
And killall the Dock or login again to get an approximation of the old look. If you really must.
Also, you can add a “Recent Items” stack to the dock by setting these defaults:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
…and pin it to the side with:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start
(again, killall is your friend)