Force-hide menus and status bar in a Mac app?

August 10, 2012 10:01 AM

A Mac app in which I want to force-hide the top menu bars and bottom status bar (not possible natively within the app): what third-party utilities or UI-hacking tools could help?

App is Sibelius 7 (a 2D graphic program for music notation); OS is Lion.

Sibelius 7 is based on very different ideas about screen real estate and UI than previous versions. There are three horizontal bars that apparently can't be hidden via the app's preferences:

1) a Microsoft-style Ribbon that takes up a standard menu bar's height even when minimized;
2) the tab row of a tabbed document interface, always present even if there's only one tab; and
3) a non-useful and visually distracting bottom status bar.

The app's "full-screen mode" is almost meaningless, only hiding Apple's own system-level menu bar and still displaying all three of these bars!

Being able to force-hide any or all of the three bars would be exciting. Any tools that can do this?

posted by kalapierson to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I've never heard of anything, and would be surprised if what you're asking for existed. I've done a tiny bit of hobbiest-level development on mac OS, and I cannot think of anyway this could be achieved in the way you're describing, unless sibelius has a plug-in architecture that lets you influence application UI, which would be really surprising.

Your best bet, honestly, would be to write to Sibelius and hope other people are complaining too, and then maybe (maybe) it will get fixed somewhere down the road.
posted by cmyr at 5:55 PM on August 10, 2012