What to do with the top-right window space: Esfera

Also, drag operations/gestures are difficult for many people. People who have a hard time coordinating holding the button and making a gesture with the mouse, such as disabled people, seniors, or children aren't going to be able to use any of these features at all.

Finally, most of the features he talks about implementing are highly app dependant; that is, the application itself needs to cooperate in this. Wouldn't it be better to add features to the apps then worry about how to unify these into the window manager? Communication between a video player and video editor is not going to happen for free just because there's a sphere to click on.

Not really. Sun had that idea with Looking Glass already.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv8VlpoK_g

Now, admitted, it's probably because I use Enlightenment dr16, so I have minimize & window roll-up buttons on the left of my title bar, and sticky, close, and fly-out for other window operations buttons on the right...

So just why does this control need to be in the right corner? I know most people are used to the paradigm coming from Windows where the minimize, maximize, and close buttons are on the left, and the right is a general window operations menu (at least, it used to be - I haven't played with Vista or 7 yet. For that matter, I'm not sure XP still has that...).

Now, OS X seems to have its controls all on the left - perhaps they're trying to unify the code base between OS X Aqua and Ubuntu? But then putting this gesture thingy on the right doesn't fit with that...

I'm just plain confused. Besides - on the back side of a window - you see what's on the front side, backwards! (Or upside down, if you flip the window that direction...) What kind of stuff do I need on that backside that isn't nicely presented in a dialog box, to be called and dismissed when needed?

When you see "Or anything you can think of" in a proposal, it often is a sign that the author hasn't thought things through. In other words, the proposal feels more "because we can", not "because this is a good thing to have".

What is this thing? Can I use it to control my windows?

I have this great idea for the icons.

"__" minimize

__
|__| maximize

X close

The right side is a great place for this window control icons,
Window operations can be destructive. Keeping these window control
icons on the right side will keep them away for other mouse clicks.

----------

What do you think of my great new idea?

:) :)

Having said that, I also agree with an earlier comment that using the whole titlebar as gesture target would be much easier to hit than this tiny spot in the corner of a screen. Also, gestures work nice with mouse-oriented people, but need additional key-shortcuts for keyboard oriented ones. I can't really see my emacs giving up one more key combination tto the window manager.

Having used Macs inbetween, I found that my muscle memory very quickly adapted to closing stuff with a button on the left.

I had never thought of using it on "real" windows before though, and in the long run, having a "front" application and a "back" options panel may be more intuitive than Edit->Preferences, oh no, Window->Options, oh no, File->Settings...

1) There is no provable usability advantage;
2) It eliminates the application icon making windows less recognizable, since before one could implicitly rely on associative visual memory, while now the explicit effort of reading the title bar is required;
3) It makes the association between windows and windows in the taskbar weaker, since before one could rely on associative memory (the application icon was preserved in presence and position between the window bar and the entry in the task bar) and now it is not anymore the case;
4) It gratuitously breaks a convention (these buttons are on the right)
5) It increases the chance of hitting one of these buttons by mistake looking for the file menu (and to hit the window close button by mistake is not nice)...

[Guess point 5 will now be solved by right aligning menus! :-) ]

Now the idea of the "ball" is even more weird.

1)At a time when everybody is moving to sub-notebooks, tablets and the like with reduced screen estate, what is the response? Add elements to the window decoration that will make them necessarily thicker, loosing more screen estate. Remember that whenever decorations are made thicker, the lost space grows quadratically with it, since screens are 2D. And also that vertical space is precisely what one should be conservative about (my laptop only has 600 pixels in vertical resolution, compelling me to reconfigure gnome to eliminate the top panel).
2) Not everybody is using a mouse on a table. To practice gestures on some devices or in some locations (a train, a plane) is very very hard;
3) There are people who have problems at precisely pointing something and complex gestures will make life impossible to them.

And although gestures are still the big thing, I think the Ubuntu people should spend a bit more time watching people in the real world struggle with the input devices and interfaces they've already got before giving them (or exacerbating) their carpal tunnel syndrome.

When six views aren't enough, we will move to a 4-D metaphor. But good luck
trying to flip the hyper-cube back around to find the "front" of your
application if you are ever so foolish as to mouse gesture equivalent of the
rite of ashkente so see what is on the para-left-meta-bottom side of your
web page.