Comments on: The wonders of transparent menus

By: Brandon

Brandon — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:12:39 +0000

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.

By: Teddy

Teddy — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:56:17 +0000

Read Jacob. You’d think Apple would have.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:46:02 +0000

Opaque menu bar. Apple, make it so!

By: Aron

Aron — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:24:15 +0000

I probably still suffer from Windowsitis in that regard. I do like to customize UI elements more than OS X typically allows.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:49:01 +0000

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.

By: Aron

Aron — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:01:22 +0000

The menu bar doesn’t bother me either, though I agree there should be a slider somewhere to control the level of transparency.

By: PatrickQG

PatrickQG — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:15:27 +0000

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?

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:56:06 +0000

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.

By: Micheal J.

Micheal J. — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:28:22 +0000

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