Filed under: OS, Software, Hacks, Productivity
Selectively hide the dock and menubar in some apps
Yet another slick tip I found while parsing my Mac OS X Hints feed is a fairly simple hack for setting the dock and menubar to auto-hide based on which app is in the foreground. This can come in very handy if you usually like to see these elements, but often work in screen-hungry apps that can't auto-hide them on their own. I'm even interested in trying this on Photoshop, which can hide the dock and menubar, but only when in full screen mode (which I don't often like to use). The tip essentially involves using something like the Property List Editor (a free app included in Apple's Developer Tools) or Pref Setter to copy and paste two short lines of code into an application's info.plist file. The hint contains everything you need to hack away, including a hint from The Rob himself which I'd like to echo: definitely make a backup of the app, or at least the info.plist file, before you copy and paste your way into a problem. That said, enjoy having the best of both worlds.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
(01) said 7:54PM on 1-25-2007
nice, if I was more of a terminal junkie I'd try this one out.
I myself prefer to keep the dock hidden all the time in conjunction w/ menufla(http://ninjakitten.us/). It's amazing how much more space I feel like I have on my 15.4" MBP.
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Andres said 11:54PM on 1-25-2007
I did this in Photoshop CS2 using TextEdit, and it works great!
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Lars said 1:25PM on 1-26-2007
Related, or maybe not... Is there a way to prevent new icons on the desktop (from say, a couple of downloads) pushing themselves or others *under* the Dock? Just wondering...
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Mikael said 9:36AM on 2-03-2007
Works great with XCode.
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