@torque2k: The author is John Siracusa, not Jon Stokes.

pbj

Well, you can always add a white bar on top of your desktop picture using Photoshop or whatever. That´ll get rid of the translucency (since is plain white underneath)

Create an action within Photoshop and automate the whole process with Automator. That´s it.

Wheeljack

Torque2k: Jon Stokes needs to grow up, he sounds like a whining child blowing his talking points way out of proportion. A menu smear painted onto the screen with Vaseline? Please. How dramatic.

The menu bar is fine, I think it's a bit cool that your interface assumes a compatible color tint with whatever your desktop background may be. So far is looks like most people, at least in this thread, are digging it. I suppose for those who don't, well... there's OpaqueMenuBar utility. Rejoice!

Gina, thanks for sharing this.

tomahawk360

It's offensive to me because the dang color changes with every desktop pic I change to. If EVERY window had this translucency, like Vista, then it wouldn't be nearly as unbearable, but I think Jon Stokes at ArsTechnica sums it up quite nicely here:
[arstechnica.com]

"Completing the troika of insane, unnecessary changes for the worse made to Mac OS X's most prominent interface elements is the Leopard menu bar which is, inexplicably, incomprehensibly translucent.
It's more of a 'menu smear' than a menu bar, as if someone painted it onto the screen with Vaseline."

torque2k

I love the translucent menu bar too. And the menus themselves were always a little translucent (at least in 10.4) so it isn't such a big change for me.

geekgrrl77

Why is this such a problem for people?

DeleteYourself

Is anyone else having problems getting this to work? Dragged it to my Apps folder, started it up, and it doesn't do anything at all. It's showing in Activity Monitor, though. Changed the Desktop pic per the instructions, still nothing... grrrr...

torque2k

You're not alone :)

Hrunk

maybe I'm all alone on this one, but I think the translucent menu bar is sweet!

mw2006

yea, just photoshop a 20px white margin on the top and get over it. Or, find a really nice desktop pic that works with the menubar and enjoy its beautiful translucence. I actually think it'd be cool to have it changing all the time, just to mix it up a bit.
At least it's not unbearably blurry and gross like the vista window titlebars!

Quine

"Via" is mispelled in "OpaqueMenuBar [viv LifeClever]"

omerzach

For the record....I prefer an opaque old menu bar!
I simply find it 'cleaner' and easier on the eye.
Different strokes for different folks I guess.

@Quine

You might be interested in a piece of software called desktoptopia which (in the distributors words) is "a desktop background manager for the mac that automatically loads and displays designer desktops on your monitor". It costs $20, which some think is $20 too much for this kind of thing, but I took the plunge (I'm in the UK and the pound is pretty strong at the moment!) ;-)

The images are nicely done and really good quality, and you can pause or advance them as you like. I have a 24" iMac, and my clients always comment on them saying they would love something like this on their 'locked down' company notebook. It may sound like a small point, but this helps creates a good impresson of my business (a marketing/creative agency).

If the price is too much to bear, then you might like something called DeskLickr. As you might expect, this can pull your desktop images from your Flickr account. In addition, you can use tagged photos, or a dedicated desktop group.

FizzyPopMan

I for one hate the new menu bar and would be glad to be rid of it, but this app does not seem to work for me.

dalton

As someone who spent the first day after installing leopard trying to find a way to get rid of the damn translucent menu-bar i thought i'd put in my 2cents.

I think the menu-bar might actually be an improvement on high-resolution displays where you have lots of space and windows are rarely minimized and plenty of your wallpaper is always on display.

However on my 15" Macbook Pro, where there is little screen real-estate, most of my windows are maximized - they have to be for me to work. In this situation rather than having the menu-bar fade into the wallpaper, i instead have a textured bar above the current window that i am working in that is both a different colour and more busy than the rest of my screen and is horribly, horribly distracting.
[Clearly this new feature was designed for top of the range mac desktops and their popular notebook ranges can be damned.]

Sure, I *could* change my desktop wallpaper to a less busy one, but I *should* just be able to turn of the translucency.
I also happen to like my wallpaper.

(Needless to say, I'm currently using OpaqueMenuBar)

yarr

Didn't work for me either. Apple should at least give us the option to make the menu bar translucent or not. Personally, I hate it. And some us us can't just whip-up a photoshop creation on all our pictures we choose to use for a desktop picture. Please someone find a way to hack this terrible "addition" to the otherwise beautiful OS.

viewpoint

A quick update:

Desktoptopia and OpaqueMenuBar do not work together.
I've contacted the support team to determine whether there is a fix.

FizzyPopMan

Hey folks. Rather than installing a custom piece of (possibly unstable) memory consuming software - just edit the desktop background to contain a solid colur bar at the top. You can even create an automator or photoshop action to do this if you have a lot of desktop backgrounds.

One can experiment with the color to get a good result, black works well.

arnarbi

@INFORMEDBYME

Thanks for the tip...I've just installed MenuBar and it works a treat!

I like the fact that it also allows you to toggle between a translucent, white, or black (well silver grey) background....an added bonus!

Highly recommended 10/10!

FizzyPopMan