Yet Another Window Applet For Gnome [Ubuntu]

I used some Compiz settings and Namebar to hide the Windows titlebars and display the window title and buttons on the Gnome panel.

ElGandoz suggested (in a comment) an Window applet for Gnome called WindowApplets (actually there are 2 applets) which substitute maximized window title and buttons in a better way than NameBar. If you are worried about the buttons (see the screenshot in the beginning of the post) not fitting your theme: don't worry about it, you can change those.

The difference between Namebar and WindowApplets is that WindowApplets comes with two applets and you can position the window title and minimize, restore and close buttons separately on the Gnome panel. Also, you can set from within WindowApplets options to remove the maximized windows titlebar automatically, you can customize the font size, color and face and many other useful customizations.

If you want to give WindowApplets a try, you can add the Launchpad PPA (Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid only):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tsbarnes/misc && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-window-applets

Once you install the 2 packages, right click on your Gnome panel, select "Add to panel" and add "Window title" and "Window buttons". You can now drag each one around or right click and select "Preferences" to customize the applets.

You can choose to hide the maximized windows titlebar, in the "Window buttons" applet preferences, on the "Behavior" tab:

If you don't use Ubuntu, you can download WindowApplets source files.