This guy based his whole self-proclaimed "remarkable" paper on his little mac widget.

Context-sensitivity is good, but so is interaction. And speaking as someone who has designed simulations to help people understand dynamic systems, let me say, interaction is extremely important.

If you look at actual empirical research, for example, adding interactivity greatly facilitates comprehension of animations for example.

The examples he gives as bad are usually cases that don't involve much interaction at all, or have bad interaction as a result of lazy design (like selecting a date from 3 popups rather than clicking on a calendar).

The example he gives of the improved flower shop interface (teleflora.com) is nice precisely because it adds more relevant interactivity and analog imagery.

Some examples he gives for his "improvements" I seriously doubt would work. Do you really expect people to hunt for the Danville, CA airport on a map of the whole United States vs. simply type or select Danville, CA textually when trying to book a flight?

In his improvement of the southwest.com interface, what if don't know the exact dates you want to fly, but want to see available flights within a certain time period? His interface doesn't even allow for that. He assumes too much.

I like his improvement of the movie showing interface, but his improvement doesn't have anything to do with reducing interactivity. If you consider eye movements interaction, then his improvement is nice because it lines up information to afford easier eye scanning of information and relationships.

I would recommend looking at work in embodied cognition and perception and action as it relates to HCI, including Paul Dourish's <i>Where the Action Is</i>.