Fisheye
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/fisheyemenu/
The implementation that was mentioned on some popular blogs was actually pretty lame.
Peephole display
Context screen
http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/projects/focuspluscontextscreens
Scrolling
http://www.mtl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/papers/uist2000.pdf
http://research.microsoft.com/users/kenh/papers/Quantitative_Analysis_of_Scrolling_Techniques.pdf
Popout Prism
http://downloads.parc.com/technologies/PopoutPrism.html
A more user-friendly direction
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/070103/computing.html
Flatland (whiteboard + pen)
http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/papers/chi99-demo.pdf
http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/papers/chi99.pdf
whiteboard
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~francois/
http://home.att.net/~kiana.matthews/independent_study/Aesthetics_Paper.htm
Jon Udell on GUI vs. browser
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/10/17/GUIvsBrowserAgain
http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/580#thread
XAML
thinlets
XUL
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/11/03/CuiBono
Cruft in interfaces
http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374
Note: OneNotes doesn't require you to save notes.
LongHorn UI. Where are the simplifications? (Richard Tallent)
http://www.tallent.us/CommentView.aspx?guid=e621658b-7291-4a42-a9f6-fbd4d3829a5f
Cool UI prototypes
http://patrickbaudisch.com/projects/flatvolumecontrol/
Links
OSNews on CLI vs. GUI.