Leopard's Menu Smear · Oct 29, 8:31am
Today, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa released his review of Mac OS X Leopard. Siracusa always provides the best, most honest, and even-handed review of every new release of Mac OS X, and this time around is no different. One particular gem in his review, is John’s opinion of the transparent menu bar in Leopard:
It’s more of a “menu smear” than a menu bar, as if someone painted it onto the screen with Vaseline.
He continues:
It used to be worse, believe it or not. In prerelease versions of Leopard, the menu bar was even less opaque—comically so. But Apple gets zero points from me for lessening the degree of transparency [in the final version of the OS]. That’d be like congratulating someone for extinguishing the left half of his body after intentionally lighting himself on fire.
Spot on, and more importantly, hilarious. I couldn’t agree more John. If a hack isn’t released in the next week or so that lets me make the menu bar and menus opaque again, I’m cracking open XCode and getting to work.
That being said, apart from some visual tweaks that I am not a fan of, Leopard is a wonderful refinement on what was already the finest operating system in the land.
UPDATE: If you hate the translucent menu bar as much as me, and even wish for rounded corners again, there are now hacks for restoring opacity and rounded corners back to your beloved menu bar. Share and enjoy!
What say you?
- I haven’t used Leopard even in betas so I will have to see for myself.
I hope there is one of those nifty terminal hacks that lets you set the opacity levels.
— Robert 265 days ago # - Well, I’m kind of one of those fanatic Apple disciples, that fall in love and instantly buy whatever his Steveness foists upon us. No wonder that I strongly have to disagree, as I’m absolutely happy with the new menubar’s milky transparency (and the dock and whatever they’re trying to run down only because it’s new). I even used MenuShade.app on Tiger for some time, which makes Tiger’s menubar transparent (alpha only, no blur). Laugh at me, if you will.
But there’s one little detail I missed in the first place, it’s the rounded corners on the top edges of the menubar. Now, after four days of heavily working with Leopard, I’m slowly getting used to that.
Having said that, I possibly ran into a serious bug (twice), maybe an issue with messy OpenGL code and the new drivers. Take a look at what it does here: http://flickr.com/photos/60883496@N00/1795838390/ .
Funny, huh? I guess they sold me the Hippie-Edition of Leopard that makes your gpu render this famous Sky with Diamonds…
Whatever, in my eyes Leopard is the greatest piece of software I got since … um … Logic Studio, hehe.
— Daniel 264 days ago # - I’ll be waiting for you to crack open Xcode and make some changes! Please make them available to anyone.
I already used the hack to make the menu bar opaque, but the dropdown menu’s are transparent as well.
I would like to have those opaque too.
— Rolf 263 days ago # - Count me in with Rolf – I’d love to have a way to remove the vaseline smear from the drop-down menus.
— Dan 242 days ago #
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