Less Transparent Changes

Despite Steve Jobs’ sell job at Macworld on Leopard’s “cool” transparent menu bar, the people’s voices have been heard. Today’s update to OS X includes the following two changes:

Desktop

Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences.

Adjusts menus to be slightly-less translucent overall.

It’s interesting how little design aesthetic changes like this get reversed post-launch.

Another minor change to Mail:

Mail

Mail now automatically disables the (unsupported) third-party plugin GrowlMail version 1.1.2 or earlier to avoid issues.

So are there “supported” third-party plugins that I don’t know about?

There are more interesting Dock fixes too:

Dock

Updates Stacks with a List view option, a Folder view option, and an updated background for Grid view.

Thankfully this once pre-release feature has been reinstated for the Dock. I kinda felt the stacks functionality was a little half-baked without those options.