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Well, WordPress 2.5 has been released for about a week now, and I’ve been able to grace Webmacster87.info with its presence after spending some time last night doing an update. I’ve had some opportunities to play around with the new admin interface and some of the other changes, and since this is such a significant update to WordPress, what better time to do a review of the update? So, I’m going to take the time now to discuss some of the things that I like about the update, some of the things that I don’t like, as well as talking about some of the things that I’ve done to Webmacster87.info during last night’s update.
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Tags: 2.5, administration, Dashboard, features, interface, review, update, widgets, WordPress

It’s no secret that my absolute least favorite feature of Mac OS X Leopard is the translucent menu bar. I’d like to know which Apple User Interface Designer got hit on the head with something right before he came up with this idea, because it really ONLY looks slightly good when you have a full view on the Desktop, which for me, represents less than 1% of the time I spend on my computer. And would it have killed Apple to at the very least add a setting that would let you set how much opacity that menu bar gave off, or turn off the translucency completely?

However, a recent Macworld Video turned me on to some Mac Gems that change or fix many of users’ complaints about the new interface, and one of the gems they mentioned was an application called OpaqueMenuBar. The title is almost completely descriptive of what the app does, but I’ll explain it anyway.

You download OpaqueMenuBar and add it to your Applications folder, and then open ‘er up. It doesn’t show anything in the Dock or the menu bar that suggests that it’s open, but nevertheless, it’s a process that runs in the background, and you’ll know that when after a few seconds go by, POOF!!! Your menu bar now has a completely white background, and is not transparent at all. What happened?

Essentially, OpaqueMenuBar is an application that dynamically adds a white stripe to the top of your Desktop picture which shines through the translucent menu bar, essentially making it opaque. It works completely automatically (albeit it takes a few seconds to do the job), so you can go into the Desktop preference pane, switch to a new desktop, and your menu bar will return to its white, opaque state after a few seconds. In practice, this worked for me about 98% of the time, although once or twice I would switch to a desktop that OpaqueMenuBar didn’t update. However, after switching to another desktop and back to the one in question, OpaqueMenuBar worked fine. Once my desktop was selected (no longer hindered by the desire to have a desirable top strip of the screen), it was set it and forget it. OpaqueMenuBar runs in the background, and according to Activity Monitor, uses no CPU and only a small amount of RAM.

Activity Monitor does have one limitation: If you have your Desktop preferences set to automatically change your desktop picture on a schedule, it won’t work properly. But for most users that don’t have this option set, this is a great application, and it has certainly made my menu bar MUCH less of a distraction. Now, everyone go to work and flood Apple’s feedback boxes demanding the ability to set the opacity of the menu bar OURSELVES!

Final Review:

Incidentally, the Macworld Video also mentions solutions for tweaking Leopard’s Dock. Personally, I’m cool (not thrilled, but cool) with the new Dock in Leopard, and won’t be using any of the other apps mentioned in the video, but if you want to bring back some order (or cause more chaos) in your Leopard life, check out the video for some other great tweaking Mac Gems.

Tags: background, Desktop, interface, Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld, menu bar, opaque, review, translucent, tweaks, Video

I’m probably not the only person on the block who has thought that of the various user experiences in the many applications that make up Mac OS X, network settings have been some of the worst. Apparently Apple agreed, because the various network settings have probably gotten the most reorganization of any other settings in the operating system to be much more intuitive and much friendlier to the common man, while still retaining the power and control that many IT users need. This weekend (Saturday and Sunday) has a two-part Leopard Feature Presentation on the network tools that make up Mac OS X. Today’s presentation looks at AirPort Utility, the built-in setup and management software for those of you with an AirPort Extreme or Express Base Station. I was going to give this a pretty good review at first, but now that this application has completely screwed me, I’m going to start begging for some help.
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Tags: accessibility, AirPort, base station, broken, firewall, Help, interface, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, review, security, utility, wifi, wireless, WPA