MooO Transparent Menu is a free application that lets you customize the look of your Windows OS interface in a simple aspect: with this small program you can make all Windows menus become transparent and also change their color from the built-in palette.
It might not seem like much, but this feature is not present in any Windows operating system and some might like the opportunity of making menus look stylish and match them with the system theme or desktop background.
Installation & Requirements
During its adware-free installation, MooO Transparent Menu offers the standard options of creating desktop and Start Menu shortcuts, although the program runs in the system tray and can be easily accesed through the related icon.
The application runs on all versions of Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 7 and 8 with no additional system requirements.
Interface
MooO Transparent Menu doesn’t have a traditional UI: the program’s options and settings are available in the tray icon’s context menu. From here, users can enable/disable the program, change the transparency and skin of Windows menus, change the language and set the program to start at system boot.
By default, menu transparency is set at 10%, enough to see a difference from solid color yet leave contained text readable. The built-in collection of skins is composed of simple color combinations for background, text and selections. For those that prefer menus with higher levels of transparency, the color schemes with dark backgrounds are the best choices in terms of readability.
MooO Transparent Menu has a multilingual interface with lots of languages available, but most of the translations are partial. There is no built-in or online Help manual, but the application is easy enough to use without one so it’s not much of an inconvenient.
Pros
– Free program for non-commercial use.
– Simple, quick installation.
– Allows users to change the skin and transparency of Windows menus.
Cons
– The built-in menu skins affect system colors. Context menus of some third-party applications may only be partially affected. For example, you could end up with light-grey text on white background, which is very hard to read.
Conclusion
MooO Transparent Menu is very easy to use and includes lots of menu skins that users can choose from. While some might be discouraged from the lack of options, MooO Transparent Menu was in fact designed for a simple task, and through its simplicity it remains light on system resources.
