PresentYourApps [via] is a little freeware hack that lets you auto-hide the OS X dock. Uh, wait, I could already do that. But it also lets you auto-hide the menu bar — and, unlike MenuShade, which just dims it, PresentYourApps really sets it to auto-hiding, just like the Dock, so that your entire screen is usable space and you can move your cursor to the top of screen and get the menu bar to slide back down, just like it does when you’re using some media apps in full-screen mode.

I love the idea, but the implementation is crap. You have to manually enable hidden mode for each and every application, and it only works if your account has administrative rights (because the hack consists in editing each application’s plist) — instead of asking you to authenticate, it just restarts the app as it’s intended to, without any error message at all, but hasn’t actually done anything to it. By the way, I do not like some third-party software restarting my apps for me. And check out the icon. Yes, it matters.

Basically, this program is doing every single thing wrong, I don’t trust it, and I’ll wait for somebody else’s version. Why the hell isn’t that standard OS X functionality anyway?

P.S. [+3h] Ah, I knew I’d seen something like this sometime before — but I didn’t try it, because it’s not freeware, so I forgot about it. Thanks to Mika for pointing me to Menufela, which is the right way to do this thing, in a simple preferences pane with one checkbox (and another one to hide that unseemly Spotlight icon if you will). I don’t like buying hacks, but I think I might actually want to pay (five little bucks) for this one, if it turns out to be as reliable as I expect it has no good reason not to be.

Oh, and now that I’m trying it out, I have to add this good reason to do the same: prevent menu bar burn-in on your monitor.