Name: MenuShade
Rating: 4.0625 (5 reviews)

I've just watched episode 22 of Macbreak Weekly in which Merlin Mann recommends Menubar which as far as I know is the only way to completely remove the menubar. Surprisingly there is still no version for Leopard and I would like to add my request for this.

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For equivalent effects with Leopard, I use a combination of LeoColorbar (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/26081/leocolorbar) and Menu Eclipse (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/27686/menu-eclipse). Both are free and provide some nice customization.

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I like it! It is easier on the eyes and works well with 10.4.11

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I wish they would make this Leopard compatible. Would be nice to dim the menubar when it's not needed.

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Oh my god, it looks like Leopard copied his idea! :-D

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I just found out that not only does it shade, but can also become transparent... even invisible... great great app for those without 10.5

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Works great. I have a laptop so I do not have to worry about the menu burning the screen but i do feel like I can pay more attention on windows that are open. The menu fading in and out is a nice touch as well. Although this is a simple application, I will always be using it now that I tried it. One comment... if you could make the icon hidden it would be perfect. I just changed the Icon to something that looks cool. Other then that it is great

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This doesn't work on Leopard, which I figured. Hopefully it will get updated. My Leopard Menu bar is Opaque!

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Works great except the programs icon shows up in the dock, which is a show-stopper for me. Making the program a background-only app (by editing it's Info.plist) breaks the fake transparency feature. Hopefully the author will fix this shortcoming by removing the dock icon and adding a quit button to the preferences window. 10.4.9 PowerPC

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I also have this problem with Virtue Desktops. It only works on one desktop. Since this is freeware, it will probably never get fixed. Also, Virtue Desktops is now closing down shop, so only Leopard will save us.

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Menushade professes to be a lot many things like getting transparency to the menu bar but all it really does is show you the menubars in black and purple. Of very limited utility

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i have virtue desktops and when i run menushade it only works on one of the desktops...so menubar is darken and when i switch to another desktop the menubar stays to default can anyone help me with that

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Very cool. Both my Dad and best friend were shocked when I showed them the effect it has on the screen. (Used to have a program to do this on my Amiga oh so long ago.) I agree that being able to utilize the space where the menu was with moving windows to the top of the screen would be an excellent option if possible. I would also like to see MenuShade add itself to one of the normal menus in the menubar or have an icon in the menubar like the Airport, Bluetooth, etc... A great program though. Please keep working on it.

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This also breaks the feature of "GeekBind" where you can use a hotkey to move windows around the screen. Menushade's window gets moved instead. The window always has focus, it probably shouldn't. Or maybe this is a bug with GeekBind.

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Forgot two things; 1. The window MenuShade creates gets slid out of the way with "Show Desktop" of Expose. 2. When showing Dashboard, MenuShade should hide it's window.

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That fixed the problem. I'm now in love with Menushade again. Thank you thank you thank you.

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Maybe I'm an idiot but Menushade will not revert back to the shaded condition after I hover over the menubar. I launch menushade, adjust shade level, which works but then when I mouse over the menubar it brightens as it should but never reverts back to shaded condition. This also applies to transperancy mode. 0.7 worked perfectly for me. Am I missing something here? I've trashed every plist I could imagine that would have a mal affect on the app. One last thing, if I go back into menushade preferences and adjust the level of shade it will reapply it to the menubar but again disappear after i mouse over it. Please help as I love this app and can hardly use my mac with out it. Using MBP if that makes any difference.

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quite like the idea of being able to manilulate the menu bar visibility and i appreciate the dock item, even if others don't - my dock is not so bloated that it worries me to have another item in it this little app is easy to use, easy to configure, easy to uninstall again and let's not forget it's *free* what i would like to see, though, is a feature to make my menu bar completely disappear ... now that'd be real neat!

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Please return from V07 the option that in order to change any setting you would launch MenuShade again. Having it taking space in the dock and in the command+tab is not efficient for this type of app. Except for this it is perfect. thanks

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If you downloaded version .7, trash it and download version 1.0. The bug in v.7 is now fixed and v1.0 works just fine. In this version, you can choose the color of the shading, its brightness, the unshaded brightness, transition speed, and even add exceptions for apps that you don't want affected by MenuShade. What more could you want? Beautiful!

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Aw jeez, later in the day v. 1.0 got released, and what was given with one hand has been taken away with the other. Now we have the Preferences, but there's the little bugger eating up space in the Dock. Please, author, can't we go back to the previous implementation?

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Works as advertised, and I really appreciate the fact that, although this is an application, it is written so that no icon appears in the Dock (although it's a very nice icon indeed). I wish more authors of these utility apps. would so thoughtful to take the trouble to do this. But double-clicking the icon of this (launched) app. does NOT bring up a preference box. Probably a bug.

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is there any app that will make the menubar transparent?

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You can adjust the brightness of your display if it hurts your eyes. Or you can have your menu bar dark and the rest of your screen bright??? Whatever floats your boat.

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same here can't use it without the color pre..

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in the old version the shade was a nice blue color, or there had been a preference option to set the color of the shade, I forget--that option seems to be gone? if you don't plan to change this, could you put up a link to 0.4?

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0.4 still works with Tiger surprisingly... but i couldn't seem to access the Preferences or even quit MenuShade. i did double-click on the icon again to focus on it, but it didn't work? perhaps this could be a problem with Tiger.

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It was using 15 MB + RAM here as well. Pretty cool app but when I went to play an .mp4 file in VLC (which I do a lot) the shading remained along the top of the screen...very distracting. I agree when someone else said an app that would make the menu bar disappear altogether would be very cool...

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A transparent menu bar would be cooler.

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1.02M 23.5M 4.36M 137M This is the memory usage we see here. ~ 1.02 MB is all that is used, rest is shared libraries etc. If your first number (in top, from Terminal) is considerably larger than that, please send us a bug report. Thanks!

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uses 15mb RAM and sometimes more , this is a problem.

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Very cool idea. But why the hell does it eat up 17MB of RAM. It's just a transparent floating window. C'mon people, seriously. I can't code in cocoa, but I know 17MB just for this means there's some serious bloat going on. Heck, iChat takes up 13MB, and there's certainly alot more complexity going on there.

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awesome freeware

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Oooooh, cool! Kills a lot more glare than I realized was there...

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Thank you! I've wanted something like this for so long! I often use a Shapeshifter theme to try and darken the glare from the menu bar but not all of the themes do that. Now my eyes can relax. Thank you for this small but extremely valuabe little gem!

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I kinda like it too. Thanks, zigzag. Five stars coz it does exactly what it says... and it's free. My only addition to the wish list would be to have a reversible hack to the system rather than a running application. Activity Monitor reports between zero and 0.50% CPU when moving the cursor to the menu, but Real Memory is 11.5 MB and Virtual Memory is 167 MB -- a little steep. (933 Quicksilver 2002, 1024 RAM)

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I'd pay big bucks for Menu Hiding, while your tweaking code up there! Slide you mouse up there and down comes the menu. That's my wish.

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I may be in the minority so far, but I like it. That it goes from as dark as you set it, to as light as you set it, is a plus in my book. Transparancy might be nice, but I'm not missing that feature. It still hangs out in my dock (no problem), and hiding it turns off its functionality. Tho this is a way to turn it off without quitting the application. Thanks!

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Colored menubar is not attractive. Transparent Menubar is more appealing. Make the menu bar TRANSPARENT. This is what we want NOT color

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We will be adding transparency in a future version. Stay tuned. For other's feedback: It was the first release! Its now configurable and no more dock icon. Sorry about the horrible art on the icon, but if anyone's willing to provide a better one please let us know!

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It would be exactly what I've been waiting for since switching to OS X three years ago from 9.2.2, if it could make the menubar transparent instead of coloured. I know many people have wanted this feature to be implemented somehow (there's an APE module to do it, but APEs cause problems too, i for one can't install it on my system without causing major ruckus and APE doesn't work if you have to log in as root anyway). Any chance of this app doing that in a future release? I'd pay for that.

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Oh dear lord this is awful. When they say "darker", they mean "so dark the text becomes unreadable" (I like to check the time and my system load using menu bar stuff). Also, it leaves an ugly mess of an icon in the dock while it's running. (I'm trying to work out what the icon is... is it a fish? Or an oil slick?) No preferences, should be a preference pane anyway, default's too dark, and it leaves a pointless icon hanging around the dock. It might be free, but it's *still* worthless.

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perhaps nice for windows users who have just stepped over to Mac and aren't used to the menu bar on top yet...

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