[razmage]

I need to hide the title bar for an application. The bar with the title, min, max & close buttons on it.

I've tried google searches, searches here, etc. Either you can't do it or I'm using the wrong search terms. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[rab777hp]

I don't know why you need to hide it, but to let you know, it is impossible, Mac OS X was designed this way with the bar, etc.

[ekan]

Nothing on a computer is "impossible" there are just levels of difficulty.

I understand Apple's refusal to allow apps to hide the title bar, as it's just good UI design. But what about when Flash goes full screen? There's no title bar then...and what about wKioskBrowser? It hides the title bar...

We want to hide it to use a Mac as a full screen kiosk, the title bar just looks bad and confuses the user. There's got to be a solution out there somewhere...and we have to use Firefox because of the way our client script is set up...

[rab777hp]

are you and razmage the same entity?
Edit: $100!!!!
thats one expensive app, iLife is cheaper than that!

[razmage]

No we are not the same person. I was seeking the answer for a normal app not a kiosk but I guess the needs are the same.

[mdawson]

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razmage wrote:

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I need to hide the title bar for an application.

Well just so you know, there are no title bars for applications in OS X and never has been in the Mac OS. Unlike Windows, application windows do not exist on the Mac platform.

To answer your question, as rab777hp correctly indicated, you cannot alter a enable and disable certain aspects of user interface objects. If a document window?s title bar is removed, you lose the ability to control the window.

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ekan wrote:

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I understand Apple's refusal to allow apps to hide the title bar, as it's just good UI design. But what about when Flash goes full screen? There's no title bar then...and what about wKioskBrowser?

Developers are provided with a set of tools in order to develop software for a given platform. When developing software for OS X, they use Apple?s APIs for creating user interface elements such as document windows. The use of those APIs by most developers is why different applications have a consistent look within a given operating system or version thereof.

The API for document windows perhaps has a parameter that allows the developer to decide to use the title bar (default) or omit it for a full screen mode, but it is not a feature that can be dynamically set by the user as it would require either the developer to go out of their way to enable such functionality or require the user to change actual code. So when you have applications that provide full screen modes or windows without title bars it is because the developer has created those modes with for certain functionality; it is not a universal setting. The developer also has to code a means for the user to minimize or close such windows.

[ekan]

Yeah, this is what I thought. It's going to take some sort of developer work to figure out Firefox full screen with no title bar...fortunately, Firefox is open source so this is entirely possible. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I'm doing within the source code. It's weird to me that no one else has solved this problem yet though...does Apple have decent documentation of their APIs?

I'll play around with the Mac source code and see if I can figure anything out...any hints are very welcome...

[mdawson]

The source code for the Mach kernel and Darwin are open source; the source code for OS X is proprietary. Thus, you cannot alter the APIs used to develop OS X software. Developers have the ability to either use Apple?s APIs to create the default window type with the title bar or, less often, a basic window with no UI elements. Otherwise, the developer has to build and design custom window objects by writing their own code for something that the OS developer already provided Most developers are not going to waste time circumventing the underlying principles of OOP just to have the document windows in their software operate inconsistent of how every other window in the OS functions.

You can no more dynamically turn title bars on an off in Aqua than you can in Aero, Luna, X11 or just about any other GUI.

[razmage]

That is not quite true. Or even close to being true. If you have the mozilla source code you CAN hide a windows title bar. Not only that but its actually in apples API to allow for it. After some digging around on lists.apple.com and developer.apple.com I came across this and then a bunch of other information around kWindowNoTitleBarAttribute and other settings that are adjustable. How else do you think some games have just the window, etc.

"On Tiger or later, you can hide or show the titlebar by setting or
clearing the kWindowNoTitleBarAttribute attribute."

You can also do it dynamically. My original question though appears that you can't do this like you can in X11, Windows, etc. or if you can there are no pre-built tools to do it (like with Windows using windowblinds, etc). Oh well.

[mdawson]

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razmage wrote:

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Or even close to being true. If you have the mozilla source code you CAN hide a windows title bar. Not only that but its actually in apples API to allow for it. After some digging around on lists.apple.com and developer.apple.com I came across this and then a bunch of other information around kWindowNoTitleBarAttribute and other settings that are adjustable. How else do you think some games have just the window, etc.

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"On Tiger or later, you can hide or show the titlebar by setting or clearing the kWindowNoTitleBarAttribute attribute."

I stated previously that, ?The API for document windows perhaps has a parameter that allows the developer to decide to use the title bar (default) or omit it.? Having an API for developers to create certain types of document windows is not the same as allowing the user to toggle the title bar on and off.

The Macworld forum is generally used for general user inquiries not developer questions, so if you wanted to do this as a developer then you should have made that clear. In either case, I did indicate that developers can do this with Apple?s APIs. Users are not going to screw around with kWindowNoTitleBarAttribute or any other API attribute.

I also stated that, ?when you have applications that provide full screen modes or windows without title bars it is because the developer has created those modes with for certain functionality (using the API)?. Hence the reason you see ?games (that) have just the window, etc.? as you brought up.

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razmage wrote:

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You can also do it dynamically. My original question though appears that you can't do this like you can in X11, Windows, etc. or if you can there are no pre-built tools to do it (like with Windows using windowblinds, etc). Oh well.

Yes, there are system hacks, particularly for Windows, that allow the user to do quite a few things to the user interface, but suppressing title bars it is still not a standard feature accessible to the user of the OS. In fact, in Windows the third-party utilities are probably just taking advantage of the fact that window parameters such as title bar size, title bar text size, border size, etc., have been user-adjustable in Windows since at least as far back as Windows 95. Thus, they may simply be making the title bar its minimum size making it appear as if it is not present; that is not the same as turning it off.

That level of GUI customization has never been a standard feature in the Mac OS although utilities do exist for altering the appearance of the OS X GUI. Unlike Microsoft, Apple is not too keen on having the user dramatically modify the user interface. As you stated in your first post, you could not find anything information on the Web about disabling title bars on the Mac and I provided reason why that is perhaps the case.

[rab777hp]

Try doing this with the open source code of webkit, it's better than mozzila code, basically Safari vs. Firefox for code.

[ekan]

I do agree that webkit is a better overall solution -- esp now that Google is jumping on the webkit bandwagon with Chrome.

However, my company, RedPost, is using Firefox as our platform to build off of, because it's:
* robust (3rd gen at this point)
* cross platform (linux, mac, windows)
* highly extensible (add-ons support is great)

So webkit anything won't work for us...we need Firefox with no title bar on the Mac...

As razmage noted, there is no user friendly, built-in mac way to turn of the titile bar, which fits with Apple's UI design (consistency is a wonderful thing...how awful would iTunes be if you could skin it???). So I'll have to turn to the developer community to figure this one out...

Seems like kWindowNoTitleBarAttribute is the trick...

[ekan]

Just some more progress on this...nothing figured out yet:

Apple developer note on kiosk mode:
* http://developer.app...002/tn2062.html
Open Firefox bugs on this issue:
* https://bugzilla.moz...g.cgi?id=370857
* https://bugzilla.moz...g.cgi?id=307371