Fixing some Leopard annoyances

Some of the UI decisions that Apple made with Leopard is questionable to say the least. The ones that gets to me are:

  • The menu bar is semi transparent, thats just lame as your background wallpaper makes the menu harder to read. An annoying fix is to add just the right amount of black or white pixels in a strip at the top of your wall paper. This does not solve the problem if like me you move between laptop monitor and external display being primary depending on your location.
  • The glassy dock takes a lot of space and just distracts, all the reflections and stuff makes the very faint dots even harder to spot. A working fix can be found here. See below for a screenshot of my fixed dock.
  • The starry desktop background that came out of the box looks unprofessional and badly done, its also too busy and distracting. A very easy fix here.

On the software front, OpenVPN were having some issues, Tunnelblick already has a fixed version out. Site is currently down though.

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