The magic ink paper was on top of HN 2 years ago[1]. I remember bouncing off it the first half dozen times I ran across it on the blogosphere. Eventually I focused, and boy was it worth it:

http://worrydream.com/MagicInk

It's still my #1 paper of all time, for both exposition and presentation (layout, typography, figures), and the paper I have quoted most often on my linkblog (http://akkartik.name/search_results?q=bret+victor)

I wanted to submit this to the recent thread on the future of UI (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055194)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120. 19 points was a lot in those days.

Edit: searchyc tells me it was resubmitted 8 months ago with success (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600799)

I particularly like the plain-English design from JJ at Graphicology, though I wish he'd used AM/PM instead of 24-hour time.

Using full sentences reminds me of a UI element* that replaces a form with an interactive sentence. The example (from a trip-reminder app) was the sentence "Do not announce these trains". Clicking "Do not" changed the sentence to "Do announce these trains 20 minutes before they depart", clicking "20 minutes" allowed the user to enter a time, and clicking "depart" changed it to "arrive". All clickable text appears as hyperlinks to let the user know what can be changed. The author then demonstrated this element scaling up to what would normally require a configuration dialog of a dozen checkboxes, radio buttons, text fields, and spin boxes. The full-sentence version has the benefit of being easy to check by reading, and it seems easier to set up in the first place, though that's hard to judge looking at mockups.

*See "Configuring notifications" from http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#case_study_train_schedules (Linked on HN over a year ago at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600799)

I highly recommend the whole article!