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Non-transparent mod for Leopard's new menubar

by David Chartier Jun 15th 2007 at 9:20PM

If you've seen any pictures or movies of Leopard's (mostly) final UI in action from this week's WWDC events or the new Leopard section at apple.com, you've probably noticed that Apple has introduced a new design to their menubar, Desktop and Dock (watch the video to see these new toys in action). The new Dock features an updated design with some eye candy that some might find more useful than others, while the menubar has gone semi-transparent in an effort to place more emphasis on an uncluttered desktop and allowing users to feature their favorite photos and desktop images.

As usual, when an OS maker dabbles with revamping some of their most standard UI conventions, not everyone will want to hop on the train for a ride. Peter Maurer and the crew at Many Tricks (makers of apps like Butler, Service Scrubber, yFlicks and more) are apparently so uninterested in taking a trip with the transparent menubar that they produced what is quite possibly the first non-transparent menubar hack for Leopard. Being that I am but a lowly professional blogger, I have no copy of Leopard on which to tinker with this mod, but given the historic quality of work from Maurer and Many Tricks, I would imagine it's written well, and the source is even provided for those who would like to have their way with this modification.

Now that we've seen the true Leopard in action and a mod for part of its UI has appeared less than a week after the unveiling, it will be interesting to see how the rest of the Mac community - particularly the developers who have the power to make modifications like this - will lay down their opinions through work like Maurer's.

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If you've seen any pictures or movies of Leopard's (mostly) final UI in action from this week's WWDC events or the new Leopard section at...
 

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Marcus

How about an option to remove transparency on mouse-over?

June 17 2007 at 2:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
basscadet

I prefer my programs to use up my G5's resources as opposed to pretty menus with shades and transparencies and animations etc etc. So, it's smth I'll never use.

June 17 2007 at 7:25 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Wario

Jonas,

Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen those vids. Glad to see the magnification is still there.

Good choice of music - Imogen Heap's "Say Goodnight and Go..." to Vista!

June 17 2007 at 2:50 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
akatsuki

"How is this all relevant if you can turn it off in the Leopard preferences?"

Well, because this is not Linux a billion stupid meaningless preferences that don't matter one bit. Apple is great partially because they make choices that make sense and don't bother letting anyone change them. So now we have a feature that adds nothing and makes it just a bit harder to read the menus, and we have an extra option box somewhere.

June 16 2007 at 6:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mgkwho

*Relevant, sorry...

-=|Mgkwho

June 16 2007 at 5:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mgkwho

*Relevant, sorry...

-=|Mgkwho

June 16 2007 at 5:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mgkwho

Chartier-

How is this all relative if you can turn it off in the Leopard preferences?

-=|Mgkwho

June 16 2007 at 4:59 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
JD

drg; I am not certain that screen burn was ever a matter of concern to computer displays in the last decade. I've never burned a screen, and the only ones I've seen that were burned were those old monochrome retail cash registers, which were on almost constantly.

To me, changing colors may be fine, but I don't see how reducing the contrast improves usability, I think it actually makes things a little worse by effectively adding noise (from the image behind the bar) and reducing contrast.

June 16 2007 at 4:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jonas

MrCynical,

I don't remember if the dock magnified during the Keynote demos, but if you look at the demo video at Apple's Leopard-page you'll see that the dock magnify...

http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/mac/macosx/2007/wwdc/apple-desktop_672x416.mov

June 16 2007 at 4:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Brian Enigma

How long 'till someone comes up with a hack for the current OS X release that emulates the translucent menubar on Leopard?

June 16 2007 at 1:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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