When Steve Jobs demoed Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June , one of the young features admit in the revise Desktop is a semi - transparent menu stripe . It ’s clearly visible in the streaming video of the tonic , and in many of the screenshots onApple ’s Leopard page .
Now , I ’m all for fancy effects , at least where it makes sense and might actually avail the drug user . But in this case , I do n’t cogitate it seduce sense — wait at many ofApple’sownscreenshots , and you ’ll see that certain entries in the menu bar are quite hard to understand , owe to the defective mix of bleak schoolbook , a semi - transparent background , and a dark desktop ikon . rather of being utile , it seems to me that — free-base on what ’s been shown , at least — the semi - transparent bill of fare measure will do nothing but annoy me when I seek to find a menu token against a non - cooperative background prototype . Of course , I wo n’t fuck for sure until October when Leopard ship and I can examine ( and discourse ) how well it does or does n’t ferment .
But that does n’t mean I ’m just sitting lazily by , await for October . No , I ’m being pro - active , in case I observe the see-through menu debar altogether non - functional . If that turns out to be the case , I ’ll want to return to a nice , solid , OS X 10.4 - like menu bar as quickly as potential . And as of today , I ’m quite happy to find that this potential issue has already been solved , fully three months or so before Leopard ’s spill .
Peter Maurer , generator of Butler , Witch , and a bit of other useful usefulness , created a simple solution : Non - Transparent Menu Baris a simple niggling program that draws a white half - round rectangle behind the menu legal profession portion of the screen , but above the scope image , thereby eliminating the menu taproom transparency . At least , that ’s what it does in theory — anyone who can lawfully test it on OS X 10.5 ca n’t talk about it . Peter himself has n’t even test it , because at the metre he wrote it , the WWDC Leopard seed had n’t yet been uploaded for non - WWDC attender developer to download . So he grow and tested his little program in 10.4 , where he tells me it works just fine ( though you ca n’t really tell for sure , give the opaque 10.4 menu taproom ) .
I ’m anticipate there may be other solution to this job down the road — hopefully Apple will include a preference ( even if hide ) with which we can set the transparency level for the card bar . But even if it does n’t , I ’m theoretically rig — I’ve got Peter ’s answer downloaded and stored away , awaiting the day it can be , if necessary , put into use to restore my satisfying menu legal profession . If this novel transparency characteristic look unappealing to you as well , you may wish to do something similar .
