Invisible window decorations

As you can conclude from my work on T-ish series I'm a great fan of unobtrusive and invisible window decorations. Aesthetic reasons aside, the main purpose of window borders that are different (in colors for example) from main GTK theme is to help us easier differentiate between different windows (active/inactive, different applications, etc.).. and to help us in working with windows of course (moving, closing, minimizing...).

But once we have became able to achieve this differentiation and usability by just themeing application areas, the functional need for distinct window border themes (aesthetic reasons aside) is gone. We can have very nice looking themes (and completely functional too) like Ish, that have window borders completely blended into GTK theme. That way it looks as there is no difference between application area and window border area and I think this is exactly as usable theme should be. OSX tiger does this fairly well.

Why do I think this is good?

Well, as first it removes unnecessary clutter from the display allowing us to concentrate more efficiently to the application we are using (because all unnecessary lines and colors are removed).

Even more, as titlebar is no more the basic handle for moving windows around the screen it frees titlebar area for adding more functional elements besides the window name. I have seen somewhere a great mockup where the menubar is completely integrated into former titlebar are. I consider this brilliant idea and would like to see this feature built into some future version of Gnome.

Further on, window moving should by default be achievable by clicking anywhere in and on the window (not just titlebar) because this approach significantly speeds-up user-computer interaction. By removing distinct window border theme we can encourage users to use this approach and lessen the potential confusion caused by the urge to still click on titlebar if titlebar is highly noticeable (as in many classic themes).

Next, this approach can offer better control to the application designers since they can rely on to fact that their application windows will look fairly uniform regardless of theme the user is currently using. Thus we can shift UI-design focus from desktop environment to the application environment.

All in all, we have inherited window border decorations from the past where highly noticeable window borders was necessity because of low graphic capabilities of that era computers. Today that isn't the case anymore, so we should throw away this outdated window frame metaphor that does not serve any significant function anymore and develop some other approaches. Apple has done well with Tiger themes so should try the other desktop developers.