While some people are absolutely fine with having the status bar sitting at the top of their screen all day, some of us prefer to hide it for the sake of maintaining a clean and tidy look on our devices home screen. While it's possible to easily hide the bar temporarily with some launchers or make its background transparent to mitigate its impact on the overall aesthetic, removing it completely is not so easy. There's also the issue that completely removing the status bar will prevent you from easily accessing your notifications.

So what's the obvious solution to this problem for anybody wishing to completely remove the bar yet retain the ability to swipe down the notification center?   According to XDA Forum Member enryea123, it's to drastically reduce the size of the status bar while making it completely transparent, thereby removing it from view while retaining enough on screen to latch onto and bring down the notification center. This is achieved by making some small modifications to the SystemUI.apk and framework-res.apk files. All the necessary steps have been laid out by enryea123 in a comprehensive and easy to follow tutorial.

The guide itself is specifically for CM10/10.1 based ROMs, but using the guide it should be possible to achieve the same result on other ROMs with a little trial and error. If you're not used to making such modifications but would like to give this a try, rest assured that it seems more difficult than it actually is. Check out the original tutorial thread for more information.