Screen real-estate, at least to me, is super important, so, the more room that I can get on my desktop for my application windows, the better. Recently, I found a way to make the Mac OS X Application Menu bar for my most-used applications hide, and appear when a mouse-over occurs. I should note that this is application specific, so a change made here will only affect *that* application, and not globally.
To make your application menu hide and appear only when the mouse is at the upper-most part of the screen, perform the following:
- Select the application you wish to modify, and CTRL-Click to bring up the contextual menu, and choose “Show Package Contents”
- After you have the Application Package Contents folder open, open the “Contents” folder:
./Contents/ - From within the “Contents” folder, open the info.plist file with a text editor (or PropertyListEditor.app which is included within the Apple Developer Tools)
- It is recommended that you use PropertyList Editor, but if you have to use a text editor, add the following lines under the first <dict> tag
- Or, if you do not have the Apple Developer Tools installed on your machine, you can use a standalone Property List Editor application like PListEditPro
<key>LSUIPresentationMode</key>
<integer>4</integer>
- Adding these above two lines, should make the top of your file look like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>LSUIPresentationMode</key>
<integer>4</integer>
- Save the file, and launch your application.
Notice that your Mac OS X Application Menu Bar is now gone… Just mouse-over where the menu should be, and Voila!!! It appears! If you need to revert back to the default setting, just remove the two lines you added to the plist file, and save the plist file.
BUGS FOUND:
- Spotlight Quick Search doesn’t always work if no access to the menu has been made since the application was originally launched.
