Leopard dock and menu bar appearance

By Ricky Buchanan • November 1, 2007

I have installed Leopard now and almost everything is going well. One thing that I noticed right away was that the translucent menu bar and the 3D reflective dock mean the screen seems more “busy” visually and I have a harder time seeing the menu bar and dock because their appearance is not always the same.

For others with low vision or other neurological difficulties with seeing, I found some neat little freeware utilities from Eternal Storms Software that can reverse these new effects. The effects of the programs are fully reversible, so if you find that the new Leopard version is more to your liking you can use the same program to re-instate the new Leopard style.

2DOrNot2D will switch between the Tiger-style 2D dock and the Leopard-style 3D dock.

OpaqueMenuBar will switch between an opaque and translucent menu bar.

There are other fancier ways to make these changes (and more) by using the terminal and certain commands, but I think that’s beyond what I want to go into here. If you are interested in that type of hints I suggest you check out MacOSXHints who have featured a lot of Leopard appearance-related hints recently.

- ATMac

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Categories: Information, Neurologically Impaired, New Software, Users, Vision Impaired
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About the Author

Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan is 33 years old and the founder and main writer for ATMac. She's bedridden with severe CFS/ME or perhaps a primary mitochondrial disorder - the doctors are not sure. When she's not working on ATMac or her other websitse she composes music, listens to audio books, does other disability advocacy, watches TV with her flatmate, and enjoys her cat.

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