Reader Desmond Biss would like an even cleaner Desktop. He writes:
I use our living room’s LCD TV as a monitor for our Mac mini. Within System Preferences one can set the Dock to automatically hide and show. Is there any way to set the menu bar on the Desktop to also automatically hide and show?
With some help, yes. That help takes the form of Chieh Cheng’s free MagicMenu 2, a collection of AppleScripts that work a little plist magic, likely along the lines described by our own Rob Griffiths in early 2007.
Just run the Finder MagicMenu On script, log out of your account, log back in, and the menu bar behaves much like the Dock when you have the Hiding feature turned on. The menu bar is absent until you place your cursor in the area once occupied by it. At this point it appears.
To undo this, simply run the Finder MagicMenu Off script, log out, log back in, and your menu bar remains omnipresent.