Steven Johnson, author of Mind Wide Open, suggested that computers need to have a “focus” mode available to any application.
“In ‘focus’ mode, a computer could automatically switch to a full-screen view of the current document and notify all other applications that you’re to be bothered only in an emergency.”
(From Steven Johnson’s Emerging Technology column, Discover, Nov 2005.)
Implementation details of this interface are left as an exercise to the reader.
But software that better matches the shape of the attention pyramid. I’ve built software that works like that recently and I have to say, it totally feels right.