How To: Customize the Mac OS X Menu Bar

Have you ever wanted to customize your Mac OS X menu bar?  Tired of the transparent white menu bar at the top of your screen?  Perhaps you want a sleek black menu bar.  Well, good news.  Now you can have one.

MenuBarFilter is an extremely lightweight app with only one purpose.  It changes the color of the OS X menu bar from white to black.  In my experience you need to make sure you disable the “Translucent menu bar” feature in the System Preferences under “Desktops and Screen Saver” in order for it to work properly.  That being said, it is also worth noting it’s still kind of buggy.  Now, it won’t break your Mac (that I’ve seen) and is still being developed so it will probably continue to improve. It is also open source and works on OS X Lion.

To install MenubarFilter, just unzip the app and double-click on the Panda icon.  Your menu bar should then immediately turn black. There is no additional configuration needed or any options, so if you want to quit the app you will have to find it in Activity Monitor and kill the process or restart Finder.  To restart Finder type this into the Terminal:

killall Finder

Here is MenubarFilter running on my Mac.  I like it so far – it’s a nice change.