Filed under: Hacks, Mods, Leopard
Opaque Leopard menubar solved
The famed annoyance of the translucent Leopard menubar has finally been solved. Steve Miner has posted a tip that involves changing an environment variable by editing a plist to make Leopard think it's running on an older Mac that doesn't support the translucency. Once done, it will make your menubar solid white. The guys at Many Tricks (of Butler fame) take this to the next level with Menu Bar Tint, which places a pleasing tint gradient over your now blindingly white menubar, and thus returning your Leopard desktop to harmony. So there you go, if you just what an opaque menubar, run Miner's trick; if then want it to look better, have a look at Menu Bar Tint.
Update: Gruber points out that commenters on Mac OSX Hints have discovered that Miner's original tip includes a kind of scaling factor. Apparently a setting of 0.63 gives you a greyish menubar "like the opaque menu bar Leopard shows on systems with older video cards." Doing it this way does not require you to have Menu Bar Tint running all the time, and yet apparently still gives a gradient (see below).
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 3)
ESJ said 10:05AM on 11-16-2007
Hey, uh, my menu bar had the gradient from the moment I started up Leopard. As in, I never had the translucent memory bar in the first place. I like the tint, but any ideas as to why this might have happened with a brand-new copy of the OS only a week after its release date?
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Islandgirl said 10:22AM on 11-16-2007
I'm still using Tiger, but hope to get a new Mac with Leopard next year. As a switcher from Windows, it's just amazing to me to read all the whining from Mac users about a translucent menu bar...which I actually like much better than the white bar in Tiger.
Really guys, constant complaints about a menu bar?
If you really want bland...and ugly...try Windows XP.
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Anthony808 said 10:13AM on 11-16-2007
I don't HATE the translucent menu bar, I just prefer it solid. So I added a BLACK (not white) 20 pixel bar to the top of my desktop image and voilà!
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Daveed V. said 10:14AM on 11-16-2007
@tuaw & @12:
The setting of CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE to 0.63 does actually create a nice gradient, and the result is _not_ transparent/translucent.
@3: I suspect it doesn't actually force the system to think that it's running on old hardware. I think it just prevents the window server from synthesizing a menu background image from the desktop background. (The Leopard menu isn't actually translucent, because if you (programatically) stick something under it, it doesn't show through. Instead, it appears Apple grabs the top pixels of the desktop background, applies a filter to the result, and uses that as the menu background.)
(And yes, the photo mosaic screensaver still works.)
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Anthony808 said 10:19AM on 11-16-2007
My solution illustrated: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2389/2037176587_caebebd5de.jpg
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TikTokk said 10:49AM on 11-16-2007
Why not just follow this tip:
http://www.weedygarden.net/2007/11/09/leopard-transparent-menu-bar-fix/
No hacks involved.
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Mitch said 10:50AM on 11-16-2007
This is a great tweak.
I didn't prefer the new menubar. I used the .63 setting and (to me) it just looks right.
See for yourself....
http://sfremote.com/Bar.png
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error said 11:05AM on 11-16-2007
The horizontal pixel below an older PPC is #5F5F5F.
Miner's trick with a 0.63 value is #616161 - so almost right but not exactly...
(three restarts later)
0.62 = #5F5F5F - so if you want the menubar to look as older PPC's, enter this in your Terminal:
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 0.62
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Simon Arch said 11:05AM on 11-16-2007
I'm confused. Why do all you people who like the translucent menubar think the who don't shouldn't be able to fix up our computers how we want them? The same goes for the Dock. People who don't like the way the OS looks by default are just as entitled to their feelings and opinions as you are to yours.
You changed your hard drive icon, you changed your wallpaper, you maybe even installed Shapeshifter to change the GUI around. Why did you do that? Why do you hate the way it looks by default? Why the hate? WHY?
I'll tell you why: You changed it around because it's YOUR computer. You don't necessarily HATE the way it looks by default, but you want to make it your own because it IS your own.
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Chris said 11:34AM on 11-16-2007
Love the transparent menu bar, transparent menus, dock and stacks (after I did the stack icon hack).
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Scott said 12:15PM on 11-16-2007
Re #27: And some of us are Mac users precisely because we don't want to diddle with system settings, and prefer to spend our time working on projects, doing stuff online, whatever. No one's denying you the "right" to attempt to alter system settings (although I think the iPhone mod mania is crazy). Sure, I changed my desktop and a few icons. But I have better things to do with my time than twiddle with bits. If I didn't, I'd have a Windows PC at home.
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Libb said 12:25PM on 11-16-2007
The translucent menubar has not been a problem for me at all, especially with the background I'm using (the picture of Earth from space looking at some sort of hurricane on the surface (looks like Katrina, it's massive), because it's almost entirely black at the top, so the menu items have sufficient contrast. Plus, it just plain looks nice IMHO. (Then again, I'm one of the five people that thought Vista Aero Glass looked better than Tiger Aqua... Guess I'm just a fan of pretty see-through things and not a fan of pinstripes!)
I also haven't had any troubles with the "reflecty" Dock, and Stacks have been great once I added the Stack Overlays. But then, the main people flipping out over the UI changes in Leopard have been middle aged designers and programmers from the days of System 7 and before, so a recent switcher like myself "wouldn't understand" I guess. I really like how Gruber and Benjamin said on the Talk Show that the only people that could possibly like the Leopard UI are newbies. Thanks a lot guys, maybe I'll just go back to Win 3.1 because it may not be pretty, but it sure does work! *rolls eyes*
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Mat Lu said 12:29PM on 11-16-2007
@26: Now that's dedication!
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Mitch said 3:42PM on 11-16-2007
i guess i might be considered lucky... i upgraded from tiger to leopard the day it came out on my new 24"imac intel with the glossy screen... and my menu bar has always been grey with black letters - i don't know what happened, but my upgrade didn't give me the translucent menu bar. Other users on the same mac have the new menu bar, but my user didn’t get it.
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zeke said 12:57PM on 11-16-2007
older cinema displays would get pixel burn in which apple states as "Image Persistence" so FYI the translucent menu bar, changes things up, just enough to help out with that... might wanna keep it in mind if your changing things up
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Guillermo said 2:00PM on 11-16-2007
WARNING: My iMac intel 25" core 2 duo hangs on startup after modify "com.apple.WindowServer.plist", I have had to restore the file in single user mode, after that the iMac works fine.
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Guillermo said 2:07PM on 11-16-2007
Sorry, I made a error "editing com.apple.WindowServer.plist" (I forget the ">" after the dict tag) but the lesson is that you have to be very careful when editing system files.
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Ominx said 2:08PM on 11-16-2007
The hack caused problems for me too. In the process of repairing permissions now...it's taking awfully long. Fingers crossed.
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Ominx said 2:33PM on 11-16-2007
Repairing permissions via the install DVD did not work. Guillermo, how did you restore the file in single user mode?
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks for any help.
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Simon Arch said 2:31PM on 11-16-2007
@Scott: "But I have better things to do with my time than twiddle with bits. If I didn't, I'd have a Windows PC at home."
You say that, and yet you've got enough time on your hands to slag people who do want to change their system settings. Methinks you doth protest too much.
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