Contrary to my usual habits, I was very excited to get my hands on Mac OS X Leopard, to the point where I went ahead and pre-ordered it, thus officially deeming myself an “early adopter.” I then spent the month of November on Webmacster87.info with my so-called Leopard Feature Presentation. However, Leopard had a few disappointing attributes, which I summed up best in the following quote that I wrote on December 1st:

Leopard does have a share of downsides, and does suffer a bit from an “Apple knows best” syndrome in the fact that a number of features don’t come with preferences to allow the user to choose what he/she wants in his/her user experience, and probably the best example of this concerns Apple’s new desktop, translucent menu bar, and 3D Dock.
From Review and Final Recap: Mac OS X Leopard

Well, at long last, these downsides have been corrected. Three and a half months after Leopard was released, 10.5.2 was published, an 180 MB update that among making many, many bug fixes, also reverses some of the “Apple knows best” attributes.

For one thing, the translucent menu bar is no longer as translucent, but even better, they’ve added an option to turn off the opaque menu bar completely! What’s now there is a greyish gradient menu bar, which is actually fairly reminiscent of the rest of Leopard’s interface (and easier on the eyes than the white translucent menu bar type I was using before).

Also, I have finally fallen in love with Stacks. Apple has now made it possible for you to set the folder icon as the representative icon for the stack (instead of a “stack” of the top three files), and the pre-Leopard list view has returned–even better because you no longer need to right-click to get to it. While I’m going to keep using Fan mode for the Downloads folder, I love the list view so much more for Applications and Documents stacks.

As for the 3D Dock, the Mac developer community is so awesome that there are a large number of freeware tools available that let you switch to the 2D Dock style if you prefer, so I think that the complaints over the 3D Dock have died down (not that I ever had problems with it).

All in all, I’d say that now with 10.5.2, Leopard is finally truly an undisputed worthwhile package that I highly recommend everyone upgrade to. Apple may have taken three and a half months to catch up, but Vista has been out for 13 months now, and Microsoft still hasn’t fixed that!

Anyway, I’m very glad to see 10.5.2, and feel so much happier using my computer thanks to it. Now let’s see if perhaps it has the power to fix random shutdowns…

Tags: Dock, features, Mac OS X Leopard, menu bar, Stacks, update

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

One of the TOP SECRET features that Apple refused to disclose during Leopard’s first preview in August 2006 was the new User Interface of Mac OS X Leopard, which Apple has referred to in its marketing as the New Desktop. This includes a new translucent menubar (originally transparent, but grumbles from users got Apple to make it a little more substantive), a new reflective/3-D Dock with Stacks, and a new unified Aqua user interface which completely eliminates the pinstripe/white gradient design and the brushed metal windows. While some of these changes help to refine the Mac OS X interface as cleaner and more pulled together, many of these changes are superfluous and unnecessary, and in some cases, downright distracting.
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Tags: Desktop, Dock, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, menu bar, review, user interface, window