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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jan
17
(2008)
The wonders of transparent menus
Filed under: general. Tags: apple, interface, macosx, macosx 10.5, menu, ui.
MacOSX 10.5 added some bling, possibly to "catch up" with Vista. The transparent menu bar sucks. Completely. Please, someone at Apple, fix this.
I've got my desktop picture set to cycle through some of my photographs. Most of the time, it’s not a big deal, but occasionally, one comes up that causes my menu bar to look like this:
Seriously.
Yes, transparency is cool. It's great to show off the power of the UI renderer, etc… But not at the sake of readability.
Thankfully there is a way to disable it.
Running the command: sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer ‘EnvironmentVariables’ -dict ‘CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE’ 0.62
Source: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071115135215262
I must be one of the only people who does not get tweaked by this, Maybe my desktop photos are all dark at the top. To be honest, I barely notice the menu bars appearance, or I know where to reach. If this is the worst feature of Leopard, we are in good shape (oaky, it lost a few serial numbers on the upgrade, but that was minor).
but we ought to have control over this as a feature- an always on,, hack it to turn it off is like, so, Windows-ish. Better, a control panel to set its opacity level.
It doesn’t bother me either, maybe it is my desktop pictures as well.
I suppose if it bothered me more I might want control over it, though.
Interestingly, launching Aperture (for me) causes the menu bar to change to the way it looks during the Leopard installer. Wonder why?
The menu bar doesn’t bother me either, though I agree there should be a slider somewhere to control the level of transparency.
I disagree wrt a slider – the whole point of the Apple UI is that it is completely polished and thought through. A slider for menu bar transparency is something I’d expect to see on Windows. The transparent menu bar doesn’t add anything from a usability perspective, often detracts from readability. Occam would say the simplest thing to do is just have a default menu bar that doesn’t suck in some cases.
I probably still suffer from Windowsitis in that regard. I do like to customize UI elements more than OS X typically allows.
Opaque menu bar. Apple, make it so!
Read Jacob. You’d think Apple would have.
While I’ve had a pretty lukewarm experience with Vista, it’s looks are definitely a plus for it. The Aero interface looks very slick. While you’d think functionality would come first, some of us are attracted to “shiny things.” Heh.