Adjusting Transparency of Menus?

[ehmjay]

To be clear: i'm not talking about the MenuBAR but the drop down menus themselves.

When 10.5 was released they were quite transparent and the look matched the transparent menubar. It was a nice visual flow. Then 10.5.1 came out and they went to almost opaque (apparently they are still SLIGHTLY transparent but at something like 95% its more or less impossible to tell).

Some apps, (compressor comes to mind) still have these transparent menu drop-downs and I think its a very good look, especially with the transparent menubar (again, visual flow is nice).

just curious: is there a way to adjust the menu transparency so that it better matches the menubar?

 

[Riemann Zeta]

Unfortunately there is not. I was one of those "crazy" people that really liked the style of 10.5.0/10.5.1--the slightly translucent menus (as opposed to the 98% opaque menus of 10.5.2+). But there appears to be no way of specifying an arbitrary menu translucency constant. The good news is that 10.6 appears to have slightly more menu translucency than 10.5.X, but this could be due to the shift to HDTV gamma (which is 2.2, instead of the old Mac OS value of 1.8).

 

[snverhallen]

I forget what the "transparent" context menu's look like. Do you mind posting a screenshot of what they look like. I don't have Compressor so I can't do it myself.

 

[ehmjay]

the funny thing is:
compressor makes the menubar opaque... even if you have it set to transparent. anyways here's a picture of the menus

Subtle... but combined with the transparent menubar its quite a nice look.

 

[snverhallen]

the funny thing is:
compressor makes the menubar opaque... even if you have it set to transparent. anyways here's a picture of the menus

Subtle... but combined with the transparent menubar its quite a nice look.

Oh yeah that does like nice, it kinda makes the menu less in your face, now looking at the difference the current (context)menu's look so stark against whatever background they're on.