contextual user interface
This weekend I read a great article by Matt Gemmell aptly titled iPad Application Design. He has a lot of great insight into what applications should look like on the device. In particular, he brings up globally-positioned editing UI, and shows some examples of how cluttered many interfaces have gotten on modern desktop machines. He points to how much more effective contextual controls can be on a device like the iPad.
Context menus are something I have come to realize that Windows handled better than Mac, heavily due to the convention of a two button mouse, which Apple seemed to so vehemently oppose. But application code has been object oriented for such a long time now, why haven’t most of our interfaces become object oriented? I think for a great deal of our tasks, contextual interfaces make more sense than globally-positioned controls.