Brother smithz, you might like this.

You need the freeware app Butler for this.

In Butler's Customize screen just drag and drop items on the Menu Bar, Natural. (you might also want to remove Butler's search field and bookmarks item, if only to save space.) That's all.

See the result: my desktop, functional without dock. [edit. link removed]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: yabor,

Thanks Yabor, i wasn't aware of this little app.
I'll try it out on my next journey into OS X :-)
Besides, the last link doesn't seem to work here, can you post it on imageshack?

Sorry, brother smithz about the dead links. I expect this link will work. (edit. link removed)

I've tried this out for one day now, and I'm very happy to have my most used apps in the menubar. No downside that I've noticed. No loss off speed (such as it is in X).

This message has been edited. Last edited by: yabor,

Brother Yabor, thanks for that link.
Well, i tried Butler this morning. Not bad, really. I also like the cascading menus you can use in your "menu-bar", that really makes sense. :-)
The only little downside for me: It's AFAIK not possible to minimize the spacing between icons... Compared to my Taskmenubar-Setup i can't get a comparable result in tightness...
And a secondary downside, which is essentially Apples fault: If you run out of space in the menubar you can't alter the Menu-bar-Font. Which i did in the Legacy, by using "Techno", the Menubar wastes approx. 1/3 less width than using the standard Font. Then you have more space for icons...

Anyway, this problem isn't so bad anymore since i'm using a 20" Widescreen now. But on my ibook this will be annoying.

Anyway, i may send a mail to the developers. :-)

I like that Butler. However, I can't seem to reposition the menu using the command key, as I can with other system menu icons. I'd love it to be right where Spotlight is.

Brother thalo, I don't know about Tiger, but in Panther, to reposition items to the right, all you have to do is go to Buter's configuration screen, and drop them on the grey "Menu Bar (Right)" strip. see picture [edit. link removed]
And see the result.[link removed]

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Ah yes, thank you brother yabor.

I can move it almost all the way right... but Spotlight is still the rightmost menu item. But not bad. This is the first utility in a while that I thought was worth a damn.

The icon has to go, lol. Sooooo-ooo kiddy.

And a secondary downside, which is essentially Apples fault: If you run out of space in the menubar you can't alter the Menu-bar-Font. Which i did in the Legacy, by using "Techno", the Menubar wastes approx. 1/3 less width than using the standard Font. Then you have more space for icons...

Wouldn't it be scandalous, brother smithz, if Leopard STILL didn't offer one the possibility to change the system font?

Meanwhile, I use Silk. Are you familiar with it? It involves hacking the OS, and some people won't risk that. As for me, Unsanity's haxies have never caused me problems (Fruitmenu I can't recommend, as it markedly slows the system down).

I'm using Arial Narrow as the system font now. It's crisp and offers much more space in the menubar. See picture. [edit. link removed]

Here's what I do to change the font: see picture [edit. link removed] -- first, scroll to Lucida Grande, select it and click on the "Origineel" button. Next, scroll to Arial Narrow for example, select it and click on the "Vervang" (= "Replace") button. Then launch any app and watch the result.

With Arial Narrow, I recommend setting the minimum font size of your browser to 14 or 13.

PS. When you change the font with Silk, there's pretty much always some problem or other. With Arial Narrow, the mouse-over labels of Butler are a mess. Maybe someone knows a perfect font?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: yabor,

quote:

Wouldn't it be scandalous, brother smithz, if Leopard STILL didn't offer one the possibility to change the system font?

OWWW, YES. I would like to bet on this, i say Apple will need some more 150 cool new features to finally realize something essential is still missing ... (maybe while looking at the legacy appearance control panel :-) (Oh wait, it's not "cool" and it's not even new! .. yiargh!)

Yep, i know Silk and tried it various times. But i never got clean perfect results with it, sometimes the baseline of the font was bad, then the rendering of the certain font simply sucked. So i'm still stuck with Lucida Grande. When i start using OS X 100% of my time i'll give it another try.
Apple needed MANY attempts to finally optimize Lucide Grande to look acceptable at most sizes. When I used Silk for a while many Fonts looked good in a few sizes and failed badly in others...

Besides that, there are still many uses of Lucida Grande in your second screenshot (silk panel). This is why i am not of fan of this haxies. You got inconsistent appearance, esp. regarding fonts. If Apple would offer something like this in a clean, system-wide manner, it would be very good.
Anyway I heard that it is possible to use Tinkertool to tweak fonts even more...

Have a nice Sunday

I'm trying Myriad Apple [edit. link removed] now. Seems perfect, so far. Smaller than Lucida, much more pleasant to read than Arial Narrow.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: yabor,

quote:

Seems perfect, so far.

Excellent, esp. the wallpaper.

brother yabor,
how did you get the trash on the desktop?

Brother thalo, my trash on the desktop is not due to any neat trick, I'm afraid. A trashcan on the desktop is included in the shareware DragThing utility, which I bought a long time ago.

If anyone wants to get rid of the shadow underneath the menubar: you need the freeware Yahoo! Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator) and the GuiShade widget, which you can download here.

Works perfectly for me in Panther. Click closely below the menubar to toggle shadow on and off.

PS The Yahoo widget Engine comes standard with a trashcan widget, but that one's so sluggish as to be unuseable -- on my eMac, anyway.

Brother Yabor,
thanks, finally i got rid of the menubar-shadow.
Only one strange issue i have here, icons disappearing under the menubar (roughly in the area the shadow was before) ... hmm, i'm now running cocktail to check system...

My icons in Panther start disappearing at just a tiny distance below the menu bar. Precisely at the height that the dock reaches on the right side of the screen, in fact. I hadn't even noticed it before. I remember reading that Apple changed the shadow in Tiger, and it seems that, true to form, they made it BIGGER.

Still, what's happening in your screenshot seems excessive. I haven't got a solution. If you want, I could mail you MY copy of the widget. You never know, maybe that one works OK in Tiger as well.

Well, it seems to be worse in Tiger. :-/
I also have the strange issue here, if i click on that half icon the icon is completely redrawn again AND the menubarshadow is drawn too... When deselecting the shadow is gone and icon is chopped in half... Uh-oh, strange.

Quote from the guishade-link you posted:
"...GUIshade is purely to give the impression that the menubar has no shadow. How it does this I'm not sure. I think it must grab a strip of the wallpaper and paste it on top of the shadow"

-> That would explain that crappy behaviour... Gnarl, and again all that effort just to DISABLE some stuff Apple force-fed it's userbase.

This is a OS X-menu-bar-shadow-killing wallpaper by IBM. I like it a lot. Beautiful, useable, and it also lets me keep an eye on my yank brothers and on my twin brother in New Zealand.

I had a weird near freeze-up yesterday on my system that I think was associated with Butler and/or DragThing, which I recently installed (for its desktop trash can).

First Safari gave out, then it kind of cascaded thru apps. Then finally froze the dock and prevented most user actions. I seem to remember that kind of cascading app failure from the early days of OS X. So irritating. And all the moreso, because the system doesn't alert you that things are bombing left and right.

I hate that about OS X. I hate having to GO LOOK to see if an application is not responding. I want the system to friggin' TELL ME THAT.

A similar freezing cascade happened to me the other day. I triggered it myself. Somewhere in Butler there is a check box for "launch these items as a group" or something to that effect. I didn't understand what that meant, so I checked the box, and then in a chimpish moment clicked on my applications folder. With the result that all my applications started being launched, freezing me out, and I had to do a hard restart.

Here's something I stumbled onto by accident. It's a Dashboard "widget" (remember that this is a stolen name and a pilfered technology by Apple); Piano Theory Widget. Educational twiddling at the very least.