MenuShade: Dim Your Menu Bar
Mac users are always looking for ways to make their workflow more productive. Most just concentrate on organizing their time and to-dos, your work environment can also make a huge difference in your productivity. There are many adjustments you can make to your Mac to make it less distracting such as having a clean desktop without icons and auto-hiding the dock. However, even with all this, the menu bar is still there adding brightness to your monitor. Many swear by a black desktop and this makes the brightness of the menu bar even more annoying. MenuShade from Nullriver Software solves this problem by dimming your menu bar.
As you can see, the default settings dim the menu bar enough so it is not distracting but not so much that you can’t see what is going on there. When you hover over the dimmed menu bar it returns to its original shade.
In the preferences you can change the color used to fade as well as add “fake transparency” which helps to further blend your menu bar into your desktop. You can also change the brightness of both the shaded and unshaded menu bars, the transition speed, and edit programs that you don’t want to use shading for (the default programs included are ones that are known to have problems with MenuShade).
If you are looking for one more way to keep yourself more focused while working on your Mac, check out MenuShade which is freeware and available from Nullriver Software.
Now if only Nullriver could make it so there hideous icon could be hidden from the dock when the application is running.
Jason,
Try Dock Dodger, http://foggynoggin.com/dockdodger
According to some guy on the Internet I encountered, Dock Dodger breaks MenuShade. Use this instead.
This is the perfect illistration of an app that shoudl be a pref panel…
@Jason Exactly my feelings… might I recommend Menufela (http://ninjakitten.us/#menufela). Only costs a fin ($5 USD) and well worth it, IMHO.
shame it doesnt seem to work in leopard
@groomedmonkey Yes, you’re absolutely right. I’m waiting patiently until the Ninja Kitten updates it. Likely that the delay is due to Unsanity’s Application Enhancer upon which Menufela depends…
@Danny, true but I’d prefer an update to MenuShade (one can replace the icon pretty easy). I read up about MenuFela and don’t like the sounds of this:
“Regrettably Menufela is a haxie, which means it relies on Unsanity's Application Enhancer framework, which has caused me problems in the past. In addition to that, because Application Enhancer is so closely tied into low level system tools, it frequently breaks with Apple updates.”
Taken from
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/menufela-hide-t.html
Plus there’s also application enhancer birthing the bsod on leopard:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306857
I don’t like things that rely on other things to work, just makes life complicated plus it just seems like lazy/ignorant coding.
*sigh* autohide menubar really should be an option in leopard tho, but if things were perfect there would be no more upgrades
You can actually use Dock Dodger and menushade together without any real problems, the only issue is that you have to add a step in order to access menushade’s preferences while it’s icon is hidden. When an app is hidden you can’t select it using the app switcher – and since menushade has no active windows, that means it can’t be selected for preference pane activation. the simple workaround is to activate menushades app icon again. this will open up the preference window by default, and you will be able to change settings.
Not too big a deal for an app like menushade that really doesn’t need to be tweaked often…