I built my own macOS dock because I was tired of icons reverting after every app update.

  I've been customizing my Mac setup for years. One thing that always bothered me was the icon situation — if you want a custom icon on macOS, you have to manually paste it through the Get Info dialog for every single app. And the moment that app updates? Gone. Back to the default. You do it all over again. I wanted something different. I wanted to set a custom icon once and have it stick, tied to the app's bundle identifier so updates don't wipe it out. I also wanted to be able to swap icons quickly without digging through Finder menus every time.

So I built DeskMat — a customizable dock that lives on your desktop alongside the standard macOS dock.

The core idea is simple: your shortcuts and their icons live in DeskMat, not in macOS itself. You pick the icon, DeskMat stores it, and it never changes unless you change it. App updates are irrelevant.

From there it kind of grew. I added widgets (weather, clock, system monitor, an LED board), reactive animated backgrounds, folder grouping for shortcuts, import/export so you can back up your whole dock setup, and a few different hover animations because why not. It's free to download and try. There's a one-time payment to unlock the pro features like widgets and visual effects — no subscription, no nonsense.

If you've ever pasted a custom icon into Get Info and then watched it disappear after an update, this was built for you.

DOWNLOAD: https://cepholotech.com/deskmat/