MacOS – How to move Dashboard widgets to the desktop in Lion

Yes. You can make it so you don't see the dock by adding a very long delay to the animation so that in practice, you never leave the mouse on the "expose the dock" target long enough to see it.

This is technically a "workaround" since the dock is still there, just slower to appear than we care about on our timescale.

Two steps are needed to set this up.

One, activate auto-hide in System Preferences → Dock → Autohide or type ⌘+⌥+D

Two, open the Terminal an type:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 100; killall Dock

You're set up now. In this example, it takes 100 seconds for the dock to appear. Make the timer even longer if you like, this long delay eventually helps you to forget that the dock is even there.

Reset to default behavior by typing:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier; killall Dock

If you decide to look at new solutions, there are a handful of applications that can do this including Blotter and TimeWorks.

I prefer the slightly less in my face menubar solution that Fantastical provides.