I want a transparent Menu Bar so I can complain too
The transparent menu bar in Mac OS X Leopard is perhaps one of the two most controversial “enhancements” to the Operating System. One could say it’s a backhanded compliment to Apple when the biggest gripe anyone has with your brand new OS is the Menu Bar and the Dock. Anyway, I had gotten used to it, even ran Menu Shade in Tiger to make my MenuBar transparent to get accustomed to it. On Friday, I get my copy of Leopard and what do I get, a slightly gray, maybe off-white, non-transparent MenuBar. What happened? No one seems to have a definitive answer
I have a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 which I believe has an NVIDIA GeForc Go5200 which was on Leopard’s supported hardware list (and Apple has a pretty good idea what video card is in every machine I think). In Tiger System Profiler reported the card as Core Image Supported. In Leopard it says its Core Image Hardware Accelerated. At the time this seemed the most likely issue, but doesn’t make any sense. I get all of Leopard’s other eye-candy, and you can’t tell me that a transparent menu bar takes more GPU horsepower than reflections in the Dock, or Time Machine. Also, when MacBooks which also show up as Core Image Hardware Accelerated have a transparent Menu Bar it makes even less sense.
Anyway I perused the forums and found this and this. A lot of people reached the same conclusions I did that it was Leopard scaling back for older hardware, but it also sounded like some older less powerful machines than mine were getting the menu bar and newer more powerful machines weren’t. There was even an anecdotal story of someone in the Apple Store playing on a new iMac with Leopard and no Transparent Menu Bar.
Anyway, I’m not going to complain too much, since for every forum post about “where did my transparent menu bar go”, there are about 5 which ask “How do I turn it off?” I’d just like a bit of an explanation for it.
While I’m on it, I thought another feature of Leopard was that drives by default don’t appear on the desktop (they are not there in all the screenshots), yet in my Clean Install I got drives on my Leopard Desktop.
October 31, 2007 at 2:41 am
Hi, when I installed Leopard the first thing I noticed was I didn’t have a transparent menu bar and thought that the guys at Apple had read every blog and forum for the last few months and decided against the translucent thing.
I have a PowerMac G5 with NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 GPU. I really like the solid menu bar and would like it to stay that way. If they fix this “bug” I hope they include some way to tweak the amount of transparency as well so I can turn it to 0%
You’re absolutely right that this whole thing about the menu bar and endless discussions is high praise for Apple. The only thing we have to worry about Mac OS X is wether our menu bars are solid or not. We all know how users of the other OS complain about every single feature whenever a new version is released. My brother’s PC burst into flames yesterday, lol, and he is now complaining because he has to work on a notebook running Vista and hates it to death.
November 8, 2007 at 3:37 am
According to Apple if you have an older video card such as the GeForce FX 5200 you will not have a translucent menu bar. Even though it is compatible with Core Image and will display most other visual effects, it does not have the OpenGL capabilities necessary for the translucent menu bar.
That still doesn’t explain the anecdotal MacBooks and iMacs with solid Menu Bar’s but oh well..
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306894