Music mockup - overlay scrollbars / no titlebar

In his GNOME Design Update article, Allan Day (contributor to GNOME UX design and user experience designer for Red Hat) has posted two very interesting comments:





The first one is about overlay scrollbars which might make it into GNOME by default, but "we'll probably have to wait to get the technical ability to do what we want" says Allan, because "the Ubuntu implementation isn’t compatible with upstream GNOME" which I'm not exactly sure what it means since Ubuntu's overlay scrollbars work just fine in GNOME 3 / GNOME Shell. Here's the comment:

We’re keen to replace traditional scrollbars with mobile-style overlaid indicators. However, the Ubuntu implementation isn’t compatible with upstream GNOME, and I don’t think we quite want that design. We’ll probably have to wait to get the technical ability to do what we want, unfortunately...

[EDIT: I've subsequently found out that they are compatible. I thought I had read that they weren't - my mistake.]

I see no titlebar — will the music app be fullscreen-only or are you experimenting with different window management?

Allan replied that maximized windows will lose their titlebars and the applications will be maximized by default. But he doesn't give any further details so it's not sure if this will only be for the new GNOME applications (Documents, Music, Mail, Boxes and so on) or for all applications.



This obviously means there will also be no window controls for maximized windows so it's not clear how you'll be able to unmaximize a window. But maybe it will work like in Ubuntu: the top panel acts like the window titlebar so you can drag the panel to unmaximize it.





These are pretty important changes for GNOME - if they will be implemented. But of course, this isn't something new for Ubuntu users because in Ubuntu, overlay scrollbars and maximized windows without a titlebar (but the window buttons are still available on the top panel) have already been used by default for the last two releases.

What do you think about removing maximized windows titlebar and overlay scrollbars?

via Reddit

Update: Allan has updated is comment, it seems he just didn't know overlay scrollbars support GTK3:The second one is a reply this question: