Wednesday, January 9, 2008 @ 6:59 PM

We have our very first reader-submitted question. Here goes:

Hi,

Read your website with interest and wondered if you can help. ... My question is through additional code, how do you make the bottom 32px bar disappear please! I only want to ... utilize the absolute full screen as if in movie mode. ... Your help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris

Unfortunately, I have bad news for you. It's currently not possible to hide that bar. I'm hoping that Apple will make some changes to how Safari on the iPhone operates in the near future. Perhaps they could tweak the browser so that the lower navigation bar only displays when the user is scrolling, and then slide back down and out of the way a second or two after the user stops scrolling or when the user starts clicking around the site. Additionally, it'd be nice if you could lock the page so that it doesn't move at all (if a page was designed to fit the screen exactly -- currently you can only prohibit horizontal scrolling, not vertical). Although, if scrolling was disabled... you'd never get back to the address bar (let alone a hiding lower navigation bar). Maybe instead of hiding the address bar completely, they can leave a sliver of it to display the page title. Clicking the title would slide back in the full address bar and navigation bar. I dunno. Apple, figure it out. Sorry I couldn't be of more help Chris.

If there are more of you out there with questions, feel free to email us at ask@iphoneminds.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

// Ryan Jennings

Labels: iphone development, javascript, question and answer, safari