Fix the Leopard Ugliness redux: tips learned in between
Filed under Apple, Software on November 21st, 2007
I have previously posted a collection of tips about fixing the Leopard ugliness (you know, the 3D dock, the Stacks and the transparent menubar).
The Mac community had been hard at work on the meantime, producing some even better tips to replace some of the previous kludgy solutions.
JWZ, of Netscape/Mozilla fame, offers some tips on how to “de-lamify your dock and menubar”. He provides tips for making the Dock stick to the side of the screen (instead of dead center) and for turning off menubar transparency.
There is an even better tip for turning off the menubar transparency than enables you to choose your own shade for the dock. Simply use the command specified on macosxhints but substitute the 1 at then end with your own decimal value between 0 and 1 (the bigger, the more white the menubar will be). 0.62 gets you nice shade of gray like the one Apple uses on old PPC machines.
I am a little worried about using this tip myself. It sets a specific preference on WindowServer, but my understanding is that WindowServer is responsible for all windows, not just the menubar. Could this setting affect other aspects of the windowing system? Like, say, some translucent windows not showing correctly? Until we here more about this, I’m hesitant to take the leap.
