The TransparentWebView is a transparent web browser for Mac OS X. That means that if the visited web page is without a background color, or the background color is set to transparent, the complete browser window will be see-through.
The window of the TransparentWebView does not have a border or a shadow and will always stay on top of other windows. It just has a title bar, so you can move the window around, and it has a resize handle (the little widget with the slanted 'grip' lines, located totally at the bottom right of almost every Mac OS X window), so you can resize the window.
A transparent browser window could be useful for special tricks. You can place a transparent screen-filling window on top of any other application window, to send special messages to the screen through a web server, or add Web UI elements (build with javascript) to any other application or quick prototyped installation.
The window can also be setup borderless, so not even the title bar and the resize widget are visible. Because you cannot move a window without its title bar, there is a useful function to toggle between a window with title bar and resize widget and a total borderless window. And because you might also want the window so big that also the space of the title bar is used – for instance if you want a full screen window starting at the top of the screen–, there is a function have to top of the content cropped of by the title bar ... if you then hide the title bar, all of the content area is visible.
The TransparentWebView app has a very limited set of UI elements, just enough to point it to the location you need, to reload the browser and to position the window the way you like:
- Command (⌘) R: Reloads the page
- Command (⌘) L: Shows a sheet to enter any url location
- Command Esc (⌘⎋): Show the window borderless, i.e. also without a title bar.
- Command Option Forward Slash (⌘⌥/): Crops the top of the content under the titlebar.
- Command (⌘) ,: Shows the Preference window to set a reload interval
- Window size, window position and URL location are automatically saved into a preferences file, so they will be the same the next time you open the app.
Through the preferences window you can specify an automatic reload interval. Set this if you want the Transparent Web View to automatic reload its content every so many minutes. Press ⌘ , to see this Preferences Window