The case of the missing title bar

The earlier Finder screenshot contained all the expected parts at the top of the window: a title bar with its three stoplight widgets on the left and some title text (and a proxy icon) in the middle; below that, a customizable toolbar with groups of buttons. Now let’s look at the top of the Maps application window.

The stoplight widgets remain, but the title bar as we know it is gone. In its place is a toolbar that starts just to the right of the vertically repositioned stoplight widgets. In this case, the content of the window scrolls up behind the new title bar/toolbar hybrid and is faintly visible thanks to in-window blending.

The most obvious advantage of this new arrangement is its compactness. The traditional title bar takes up roughly 22 points of vertical space and usually contains only the window widgets, some title text, and maybe a proxy icon. The wider the window, the larger the proportion of empty space in the title bar.

The new combined arrangement reclaims that vertical space for use by window content. Mac screens are almost always wider than they are tall, so vertical space tends to be more precious than horizontal space. According to Apple, “content-focused” design is another theme of Yosemite. Where possible, the visual and conceptual weight of the user interface is minimized and the content gets more space and emphasis.

The disadvantages of this design are also obvious. All the empty space in the traditional title bar actually served a purpose—providing a safe place to grab the window for dragging. The compact design drastically reduces the draggable area.

The empty space around the central set of toolbar items in the Maps screenshot above is an attempt to alleviate this problem, but it works best when the window is very wide. Maps addresses this problem by mandating a minimum width for the window. Safari, another application that uses this design, will hide toolbar items as the window gets narrower, shunting them off to a chevron pop-up menu.

There’s also a cruelly tempting 4-5 points of draggable vertical space above the toolbar items (and below the point where the window resizing cursor appears). For years, Chrome on the Mac has had a similar title-bar-less design, but with roughly double the vertical space available for dragging above the line of tabs.

I’m all for conserving vertical space, but I don’t like the idea of window movement gradually turning into a draggable region scavenger hunt.

Let’s not forget the other function of the traditional title bar: displaying the window title. Document windows should show the document name as the window title and therefore shouldn’t adopt the compact style that removes the title entirely.

The choice is less obvious for non-document windows. The Maps application puts the search field where the window title would be. This is a reasonable alternative to a static window title like “Maps.” It is a bit confusing, however, that the name shown in the Window menu is based on the current map location, which usually doesn’t match the text in the search field. Safari puts its newly neutered address/search bar in place of the window title, but it mostly sidesteps the window title problem by showing an intelligently truncated version of the page title on each tab.

For predominantly single-window applications, there’s often no sensible window title other than the application name. Apple’s solution for those applications in Yosemite is even more extreme. Compare the Notes application in Mavericks and Yosemite.

Notes in Yosemite incorporates the window widgets into the leftmost sidebar and surrenders the rest of the space traditionally occupied by the title bar to application content—visually, anyway. There’s still the usual amount of empty space at the top of the window available for dragging; it just happens to be styled to match the various regions of application content below it.

Despite maintaining the same draggable area, some vertical space is saved by allowing window content to nestle up against what would normally be the hard dividing line between a traditional title bar and the window content. In other words, the margin above the window content has been collapsed.

This is a clever design with fewer compromises than the combined title bar/toolbar used in Maps and Safari, but it still has some pitfalls. The lack of a clear division between window content and the title bar can lead to failed drag attempts when the cursor lands just below the valid draggable area. This design is also only feasible for applications that are not document-based and usually show just a single window. Luckily, many such applications are bundled with OS X.

All these title bar configurations are available to third-party developers via new window properties and APIs. These can be arbitrarily mixed and matched to create new designs beyond what Apple has done.

Overall, this monkeying with the title bar seems like a milder version of Apple’s interface experimentation in Lion. In both cases, bundled applications are the test subjects. In Yosemite, however, the new features are immediately available to third-party developers as well.