Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well.
Granted, the paradigm is shifting with touch, but it has been an established guideline in window design for quite some time.
Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.
This sounds reasonable if you only look at the last decade, but it simply isn't historically true.
The notion of a window manipulation widget first arrived[1] in 1984 with the Macintosh, which had a close box on the left hand side of each window's title bar. Windows 1.0 shipped a year or two later, with one widget on the left and another on the right.[2] Amiga Workbench launched the same year, with a close widget on the left and two layering widgets on the right.[3] Macintosh added a maximize button on the right a couple of years later. Windows 3 echoed the Amiga look, with a close/menu widget on the left and minimize/maximize on the right. CDE and the other Unix window managers which came along around this time generally used the same setup: a close and/or menu widget on the left and one or two zoom widgets on the right. [4]
It was not until Windows 95 that Microsoft moved all of its widgets over to the right side of the title bar. Mac OS and the Unix window managers did not follow. In my recollection it was only with the rise of KDE that Linux GUI design started to follow the Microsoft path, with min/max/close on the right... but of course there was the pin widget on the left for a while.
Mac OS continued to have the close widget on the left and the min/max widgets on the right until OS X, which moved all three to the left to make room for a new toolbar show/hide widget. The toolbar concept flopped and the button went away, so there were no right-hand widgets for a while; but now there's the full-screen widget.
In conclusion, the window title bar is a land of contrasts. Thank you.
1 - The Macintosh predecessor "Lisa" had an icon on the left side of its window title bar, but I don't know whether this was an active widget or just a decoration.
2 - I never used Windows in this era and don't know what the widgets actually did.
3 - I think they were layering widgets, but I could be wrong; I only used an Amiga for an hour at a friend's house once.
4 - I remember Solaris, Irix, and NeXTStep; the former two had the same system as Windows 3, while NeXTStep put the close box on the right and a single max/min button on the left.
Even Windows 95 (and up to at least 7, I think, although I don't use them much) still have a window control widget on the left side. The app icon, when it was still drawn, would invoke a control menu or close if you double clicked. I'm pretty sure that behavior continued to work in Vista/7 even after the actual control (the icon) isn't being drawn.
>Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.
But.... /innovation/!
I'm a firm believer that you innovate to solve interesting problems, not just to be different (ahem... Apple). And while I agree that sometimes we don't even know a problem exists until we fix it, I don't really think I'll ever exclaim "Woowee, having these buttons on the left totally makes everything so much easier! How did I ever work like this before?"
> Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well.
As GP explained, it plays well with systray icons which have been on the right for a long time. There is only one bar to use(or use extra screen space) and I would rather have systray untouched.
They could have kept them on the right but then they would get confused with the systray icons/indicators.