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.