Transluscent Menu Bar is Great - Yeah Right!

There has been a bit of a furore about the translucent menu bar.

The latest item is a flickr photo showing the ITunes menu-bar with a white spot in the second “o” of control. The comments make interesting reading – obviously a lot of “ornirary” folk are starting to use Mac OS X.

As shipped with Leopard the translucent menu-bar and the default desktop image don’t work well together. It is an unnecessary distraction when trying to work with itemss on the menu bar.

A simple bit of QA would have picked this up. One solution is to remove the distracting highlights from the ghastly default desktop image. Or even better remove, the default image altogether.

One school of thought says that by providing a translucent menu bar, punters can subtly change the way the menu-bar looks. This done by providing a customised desktop with the top 22 pixels tweaked to subtly change the effect of the menu-bar. All I say is “Yeah Right!”

Why bother providing such a convoluted work around to solve a perceived problem? And why force people to take an unecessary action to get a usable default desktop? Yes it is trivial to change desktop backgrounds. But just because we can change the desktop background, doesn’t mean that we should have to!

The workaround I chose, uses the ImageMagick mogrify command. Quite slick.