After all the brou-ha-ha we went through a few months ago over Leopard 9A410's incredibly well-meaning but decidedly under-achieving new "semi" transparent menu bar (even to the point of it being hacked within days to remove said transparency), I'm surprised I haven't seen any discussion on the 'tubes of late related to the fairly massive change showcased in build 9A527 to the menu bar, which is unfortunate because it turns out Apple actually listened to all our bitching and moaning.

I'm one of those people who think OS X's ability to auto-rotate desktop backgrounds is one of those little killer features that just does it for us. As such, I've a large array of disparate desktop backgrounds: some very high contrast, some low, some very dark and some very light. So you can imagine the transparency used in 9A410 caused more than a few problems, especially with certain images. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so it's time to be loquacious:



Yikes.

Sure, it's legible, if you sit and stare and the text for a while. But keep a bottle of Advil handy, because your head isn't going to thank you for it.

I've enough backgrounds like this that 9A410 was - at times - almost completely unusable (until I switched the background of course, but I'm lazy). As any Machead knows, the menu bar is pretty much the only system-wide UI element that you simply must be able to see and have quick at-a-glance access to at all times. (In fact, while many people chide me for it, I auto-hide my Dock and pretend for the most part that it doesn't even exist: Quicksilver FTW, baby.)

So after all this, what has Apple learned?



Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.

Exact same background, a few months of extra development time for Apple, and we see a world of difference. Now I'm definitely on-board...

...at least with regards to the menu bar.