Leopard’s translucent menu bar and I have a loathe/hate relationship: namely, I both loathe and hate it. As I said in my first impressions, I find it incredibly distracting and kind of jarring. Why, for example, is my menu bar blue? It’s never been blue before. Is it kind of down? Going through some sort of mid-OS crisis?
Way back when the menu bar was first demonstrated, developer Peter Maurer (of Butler fame) came up with a little app to adjust the translucency called Non-Transparent Menu Bar (NTMB). While this app lets you adjust the gradient of the menu bar, as well as the opacity both when the mouse is inside and outside, it didn’t quite get me where I wanted to be: back to the kind of solid menu bar we’ve had since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
So I decided to go an alternate route. Using the screenshot tool’s new coordinate-reporting function, I determined that the menu bar is about 20 pixels tall (22, if you count the bottom border). Stands to reason that if I put a solid color background behind it, I would get the kind of result I was looking for.
So I fired up Acorn (any program with simple drawing capabilities will suffice), opened up my desktop background, and inserted a 1280x20 black box (worth noting: I had to scale my picture to the size of my screen, since it was only a 1024x768 photo to begin with). Not bad, but as you can see, Leopard’s menu bar takes on kind of a silvery gradient tone when you do this. That’s a vast improvement over the translucent bar, but I just didn’t care for the color; I found it too dark for my tastes.
So I went back to my desktop picture and changed the black box to a white box. And voilà! A pristine white menu bar. Of course, you could put basically whatever color you want behind the menu bar, making it sort of ultimately customizable. And if there isn’t already a program that automatically lets you do this, I have no doubt there will be within, oh, twenty-four hours or so. But that doesn’t mean you should suffer in the meantime.
A good solution, but what about machines with rotating backgrounds? Btw, Non-Transparent Menu Bar does not work with the final build. Happy painting! :-)
Having spent the evening clean-installing Leopard and all software, I can say that I like the faded menu bar. The subtle coloring drops the menu bar to a 'background' appearance, allowing what's in the foreground to get the attention. So far the experience of Leopard is a big plus.
Faded coloring looks good. After several hours of a clean install, the subtle coloring makes sense.
Very cool. A new menu bar background for every mood. :)
C'mon guys, let's worry about the important stuff...
How do I restore the rounded corners on the menu bar?
I didn't like flat menu, so I took screenshot of Tiger's menu and increased contrast. Voila! Now menu looks almost the same.
Rounded corners can be fixed with:
http://www.manytricks.com/displaperture/
Unfortunately AFAIK there's no way to improve text rendering of the menu (because of transparency it uses less sharp blocky anti-aliasing instead of crisp subpixel one)