Is there a way to change the little glossy dock notification icons that have been changed from their pleasant form pre Lion to a glossy style badge like iOS?
An example would be the incremented indicator that notifies you of how many unread emails you have in the Mail application. It displays in the dock.
I'm not sure if I understand the problem without seeing a screenshot, but you can change the dock appearance to use the classic flat Dock style instead of the 3D glass style.
Paste this into a Terminal window and press return:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean true && killall Dock
I much prefer the flat look myself. The glass shelf is so tacky.
I don't think he is asking about the 3D reflectiveness of the dock. He is asking about the dock icon badges (like the unread count on Mail.app). Lion changed to a glossy style badge like iOS, but it used to be flat looking. From what I can tell, this can't be changed. You might want to try sending feedback to Apple if you dislike it.
I like this site (secrets.blacktree.com). It's community driven. The site offer hundreds of tweaks which you can copy and/or use their preference pane (secrets).
Of course, use at your own risk, and know how to reverse an effect before you activate it. A number of items are greyed out as new information is being generated for 10.7
However, from their site, their recommendation to your specific question is:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -float
Then logout/login. To see a number of Dock.app mods, try here
I hope this helps.
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -float just makes Dock use the appearance it usually has at the sides of the screen when it's placed at the bottom.