Yesterday, Steve Miner published a method to make the menu bar in Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” opaque, non-translucent or non-transparent — whatever you prefer to call it.

While a lot of Leopard users will probably not even see the point in this, we are very happy to finally have a solution for one of our pet peeves with the Leopard. As some of you may know, we had even created our own little application for achieving the same thing a few months ago, but the method it employed didn’t work in the final, official Leopard.

Turns out you just have to set a certain environment variable to get rid of the translucent menu bar. However, there’s one thing about this we didn’t like: Once you’ve done so, the menu bar is very white, and it looks very plain.

So we revived that aforementioned application of ours, tweaked it a little, changed it’s name, and here we are: Menu Bar Tint draws a grayscale color gradient over your menu bar, making your newly opaque menu bar feel more at home among all the other user interface elements in Mac OS X. And if you feel like going wild with colors, you’re free to do so, too.

After Macworld’s Rob Griffiths had weighed in on Mac OS X 10.5’s menu bar and mentioned Non-Transparent Menu Bar (NTMB) in passing, we learned two things from readers’ feedback:

1. We should have called this Non-Translucent Menu Bar. Oh well.
2. Users like options. More specifically, a lot of people seemed to like the idea of a menu bar that is opaque when the mouse is hovering over it, but gets more translucent (see? — we’re willing to learn) when the mouse is busy somewhere else.

So here we are, offering you yet another version of a product that will hopefully be rendered unnecessary once the operating system it’s written for is released. With this new version, you can build your own color gradient for NTMB’s menu bar mask (think rainbow!) as well as control the menu bar’s opacity depending on mouse position. Also fixes a potential issue with full-screen applications.

And we have even created a preliminary product page this time.

Now that John Gruber has linked to Non-Transparent Menu Bar, this little proof of concept has become fairly popular. And believe it or not: We even received a bug report from the ever-vigilant Daniel Jalkut — or, to put in his words, a “minor tweak” that improves the z-level positioning of our transparency killer. (Note to self: Don’t just copy code from another project. Think about it first.)

So here’s a little update (source) to Non-Transparent Menu Bar, which also makes it more usable by turning it into a background application that doesn’t clutter your dock.

Here’s a little treat for fellow developers — if you’re like Michael Tsai or us, the first thing Leopard’s new desktop made you think about was this: How do I get rid of that ridiculous semi-transparent look of the menu bar?

Look no further, it’s a no-brainer (source).

To demonstrate what Non-Transparent Menu Bar does on Tiger systems as well, it covers the menu bar by default. Choose “Toggle Level” from the application menu to put it where it actually belongs. And if you’re actually thinking about using this, you’ll probably want to change its LSUIElement value to hide it from the dock.

Update: Non-Transparent Menu Bar 1.1 does that LSUIElement stuff for you.