I don’t have nearly as much of a problem with Leopard’s translucent menu bar as most people (if you go by how vocal they get) do. My biggest concern is not the translucency, but the fact that the text is – for technical limitations in the rendering process – antialiased, but not rendered to subpixels.

Perhaps the reason I’m okay with translucency is that I’ve always used relatively low-contrast, smooth, soft and blurry images as desktop backgrounds. Something abstract, perhaps (like, say, Flow, or Bloody Hippy), but possibly also a photograph that doesn’t happen to have too many distracting elements (German Landscape, Denis’s Fog or Fraser Speirs’s Time Travel come to mind as ones I’ve recently used) Given that the menu bar applies additional blurring, lightening, lowering of the contrast and applying a translucent white-to-grey linear gradient on top of all that, not much is left of the already non-distracting background.

As such, while I appreciate his analysis of the text rendering and image filtering techniques, I can’t really help but wonder how in the world Sven would survive with the desktop backgrounds he passes off as examples in his post to begin with: even with an opaque menu bar, that still would still make for a ridiculously annoying can’t-find-a-freaking-thing desktop. Perhaps his examples are deliberately contrived to highlight the potential issues of the (faux) translucency, but I don’t see them as realistic real-world ones.

But I digress. To me, it’s not a big deal. I could be imagining this, but I rather feel as if it makes for a soothing, calming effect.

Regardless of your personal feelings (perhaps you applied the CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE hack to remove the translucency altogether), there’s apps that don’t use it at all! Either we have an elaborate hack at work here (possibly laying one menu bar on top of another), or there’s a well-hidden setting. Best-known to have an opaque bar regardless of your settings is Aperture, as pointed out by Bryan Bell (via DFLL) as well as by Matt Swann.

Further, though, I’ve found that at least one variant to get a full-screen window and yet slide out the menu bar accomplishes the same. This is not only true in apps supplied by Apple (such as QuickTime Player); for example, VMware Fusion slides out an opaque menu bar while in full screen mode. This strongly suggests that there is in fact an API – however well-concealed it may be – that lets your app request an opaque fashion for the menu bar.

Thus, to expand upon Sven’s criticism:

And the shame here is that the engineers obviously made and effort to find algorithms that make the implementation of the silly ‘transparent’ menu bar idea less painful. That sounds like hours wasted for nothing. Mere damage control. Throwing good thoughts after the bad idea of some manager or art director.

Not only did they put excessive amounts of time into optimizing this algorithm to make the menu bar look translucent yet not actually be translucent (i.e., to mitigate the distraction); they even went so far as to introduce another menu bar that behaves differently. Not just for individual apps (or modes within apps), either, but also for low-performance computers whose graphics cards don’t have the necessary oomph.

All for a highly controversial change to one of the key components (if not the very key one) of the Macintosh UI. That truly is a bit of a shame – surely, more productive areas to work on could have been found.