I wrote a Swift overlay to black out my menu bar. macOS didn't even look at it.
I wanted a black menu bar to hide the MacBook notch — but in Light mode, keeping my daily-shuffling wallpaper. It felt like a tiny app waiting to be built. It wasn't. Here's the teardown: why Apple removed the standalone dark menu bar in Mojave, how TopNotch 'works' by quietly freezing your wallpaper, a two-experiment proof that the menu bar samples your wallpaper and nothing else, and why a bright wallpaper and a black menu bar are the same pixels fighting over one color.
