I'm a little underwhelmed by the latest release of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, but I've only been using it for about an hour so far. I'm not at all sold on the new look at feel, and I can't stand the transparent menu bar. As you can see below it's not easy to read, and it almost looks as if the menu is dimmed, waiting to highlight or do something spectacular when the mouse moves over it. It's not.

I don't like to squint to read, nor do I like to have to run an application in the background to 'fix' something that shouldn't be broken. Luckily the solution is easy.

First, hide all open applications and take a screenshot of your desktop using the CMD+SHIFT+3. Fire up an image editing program (I used Photoshop) and open up the Picture # file from your Desktop.

Select the menu bar and fill it with a solid white. If you'd like to give your menu bar the pinched look that 10.4 had, draw a dark horizontal line down the middle of the menu bar.

If you have a solid color desktop background, use the eyedropper tool to select that color. Invert your selection (selecting everything but the menu bar), and fill it with the solid color.

If you don't have a solid color background, invert your selection and delete everything, leaving only the white strip where the menu bar used to be. Create a new layer below the menu bar layer, and paste a copy of the photo currently used as your desktop background there. Part of the picture should be hidden by the menu bar.

Save the new file in your Pictures folder and open the Desktop and Screen Saver preference pane. Choose the file as your new desktop background, and revel in the legible glory of your creation.

The bland 1440×900 background from my MacBook Pro is here for anyone interested.

 

Posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 10:55 pm | Filed under Software, Technology
You can follow any responses to this entry through the Comments feed.
Post a Comment | Trackback URL | Permalink URL