When I go to Desktop & Screen Saver there is no Translucent Menu Bar option. Otherwise my upgrade seems to be OK.

These little tips and stuff by Jeff Gamet are always nice. However, the pictures that accompany them are so small and there's no way to enlarge them! Either make the pictures themselves bigger or have a way to click on them to enlarge them.

Steve

Not everyone has this option and or the translucent bar. It is being said that it is a hardware issue and those that have older hardware will not have the feature. WELL, I beta tested the 9A559 on a G4 FW800 and it was there. The next release was the what used as the Retail GM and it was gone. SO this is not a hardware issue, but a software issue and Apples.

I find this obsession with the translucent menu bar to be very frightening anyway. The menu bar is a very trivial part of the whole and we/they should be worrying about "if I don't have the translucent menu bar what else could there be missing in visual support in applications?" But alas no. Everyone wants their clear bar. Ya need to think what real problems you might be having!

The translucent menu bar uses Core Image. I think that's because it's not JUST translucent, but it also blurs what's behind it a little. On hardware that doesn't support Core Image acceleration, you get the plain menu bar. In some of the prerelease versions of Leopard I guess either they used a simpler method with no blurring, like the way they've used transparency since 10.0, or they just didn't disable it on non-Core-Image-accelerating hardware like they should have. Core Image filters can work on any hardware, but not at real-time speeds. So it would be unreasonably slow without hardware acceleration.

Unfortunately this build also toned down the transparency of the menus themselves, which gives the operating system a much harsher and uglier look. Does anybody know of hacks to increase the transparency of the menus again?

It's nice to get rid of that dreadful see-through thing!

The Translucent Menu Bar box and text is unavailable on my Mac Pro that runs multiple monitors. It isn't even grayed out. It simply isn't there.

I have the same problem... on a Mac Pro with multiple monitors, the option simply isn't being shown.