How to hide the Honeycomb notification bar (root only)
The Honeycomb notification bar is quite a ways up there with the stupidest changes ever made to an OS if you ask me. I like it in theory, but there are several issues with it. First off, the notifications are horrible in portrait mode because as few as one of them might fit in the space allotted for them. More importantly though, the thing never goes away! My Tab 7.0 Plus has a gorgeous 1024 x 600 screen that is perfect for video, but because that notification bar simply won’t ever disappear (only go dark), it can’t actually display a video fullscreen. Yeah, that’s right, Honeycomb doesn’t have fullscreen mode. What on Earth were they thinking?
Luckily, there’s a solution. Unfortunately, it’s root only. Honeybar is a simple $1 app on the Android Market that hides the notification bar whenever you touch a small area in the middle of said bar. It shows a white rectangle there for the first few times you use it just to make sure you know where it is when it goes invisible, and then you’re able to control that pesky bar yourself. Hello fullscreen video, hello native resolution remote desktop.
[Android Market]
