Hi list,
First of all I don't have Unity installed currently and I'm not a
native English speaker but I'd like to share an idea I've had. I'd
like to discus combining the mockup I've quoted and the menu button
as seen in the youtube video (and Firefox 4 on Win7). If we make the
windowtitle of the window a button on all floating windows we
achieve the goal of decluttering the desktop and it doesn't get into
the mess of trying to put a whole menubar inside a tiny titlebar for
small windows and it'll leave room for dragging the window. It
doesn't require a click on the window to make it focused and then
going back to the top panel to select an option (something I find
myself doing all the time on osx). This means that it only requires
an extra click on already focused windows.
There is another advantage if multiple windows are maximized. I
don't need to know which window is maximized and focused, I should
recognize it from the content displayed in the window itself
covering my whole screen. Therefore we could display the menubuttons
of all maximized windows next to each other on the panel exposing
the menu of the hidden maximized window and at the same time provide
information on which windows are lurking beneath (probably going
from left to right in order of being maximized (or opened), like
tabs). These menu's cannot be used for window switching, but that's what the launcher is for anyway. I think the behavior of the top panel will be easier to
understand as it now only merges the "titlebar with menu inside"
exactly like it's seen on the window. I hope you'll understand my
idea, but for a visual thinker I've included a mockup
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1286396/Ubuntu/menubuttons.png .
Thanks in
advance for considering it.