I think this is a cool little trick, its designed to be used when developers are designing apps. In a nut shell, with a simple line of text, you can make specific apps of your choosing hide the dock or menu bar when they are run. If you have an app that you find needs more space on screen you can do this trick to hide the menu bar or dock. For once this trick doesn’t use Terminal.
This trick is going to use property key references, this is basically a line of code that means something to your system. When the app is run, it will check the property references and act upon them. Its kind of like an API call you find in some programs or websites, its a small bit of code, that runs a larger bit of code. The larger bit of code is run by the system and aides in making the developers job a lot easier.
To hide the screen element pick and application of your choice (a simple one to test it out on). In Finder right click on the app and select “Show Package Contents” and navigate to Contents and open “Info.plist” in TextEdit. I have mentioned that this is a long list of property key references, so don’t change any unless you know what you are doing.
In this file, near the top, there should be a piece of text that says <dict>, underneath this add the following making sure all of the text is present.
<key>LSUIPresentationMode</key>
<integer>4</integer>Hit save an open up your selected program. You should notice that the menu bar and dock have disappeared. They are in fact hiding and will re-appear when you hover your mouse over them.
This trick will behave differently depending on the number that is the “integer”:
- 0 = Default, nothing will happen.
- 1 = Should only hide the dock, although this didn’t work for me.
- 2 = Doesn’t seem to do anything (probably does).
- 3 = Will hide the menu bar and dock and wont show them when the mouse hovers over.
- 4 = Hides the menu bar and dock, and will appear when you hover over them.
You can find more specific information about this property key reference on the Apple website. I hope you have fun with this little trick. If you ever want to get back original functionality, simply delete the two lines you have just added.
