I’ve moaned about the interface evolution that deprecates scroll bars and replaces them with a sort of reverse scroll bar, a slider that operates in the direction opposite to the direction that years of working with scroll bars has trained us to operate. This morning, it occurs to me that part of the problem, perhaps a large part or even all of the problem, arises because interface designers have used an indicator that still looks like the slider on a scroll bar — the grey rectangle in Google Apps, for instance, looks fundamentally like the slider on scroll bars from time immemorial (or at least twenty-plus years).
What if, instead of a slider-bar-like grey rectangle, the margin of a window showed a lightly-knurled arc, which seems to turn in the direction corresponding to the direction the user moves the window? I don’t have access to my graphics tools and apps here, but it shouldn’t be at all hard for devs to implement such an indicator, and it would clarify for an experienced user that the window’s controller is no longer functioning as a sliding gripper, but as a geared wheel? You could even make it an interface option or (probably) a plug-in or extension. Make it so!