Change the translucent menu bar setting

Written by: Scott Haneda on Tuesday April 15th 2008, 5:52 am

Filed under: Finder, Little Smokies, OS X 10.5

With OS X Leopard 10.5, Apple brought forward a pretty strange change to the menu bar. The main menu bar had a mandatory translucency applied. This meant you could see your desktop image through the menu bar.

The internets were quite upset about this “feature”. In my opinion, rightly so.

Luckily, so much noise was made about the change, that as long as you have ran your software updates, you can finally turn this “feature” off.

Why is it a problem?
I think the image below is a case where a picture tells a thousand words.

If you use the default Apple desktop image, certain applications, such as iTunes, will get a white dot, or a star, in menu item words. This makes it ugly at best, and difficult to read at worst.

Depending on your desktop image, it may not be as apparent, or it could even be worse.

Fixing the translucent menu bar
This one is really simple. Just open your System Preferences, click on Desktop and Screen Saver, look near the bottom, and select the checkbox for “Translucent Menu Bar”.

This may not apply to your hardware configuration
According to Apple support article # 306894

The translucent Leopard menu bar appears on most computers that are equipped with a graphics card which is compatible with Core Image.

Some graphics cards, such as an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, may not have the necessary OpenGL capabilities to display a translucent menu bar even though they are compatible with Core Image. Those cards should render most effects, but not the translucent menu bar.

I am sure there are a small handful of you out there who like this feature. That’s ok too. If you recall, one of our first posts was Experiment, modify, customize, so by all means, make your computer look how you want it. I for one am happy Apple was responsive enough to give us an option to change the setting on our own accord.