BumpTop, a 3D desktop interface for Windows, is now available for download in a free and $30 “Pro” version.
I just dinked around with it for five minutes. It’s amusing, and perhaps even fun, but it feels a little primitive to me for some reason. It might the sheer boxed walls.
Still, it’s free, and this sort of thing can’t be assessed in five minutes. You have to get around inside and spend some time with it. And if you had a touchscreen machine, I could see it being a lot more fun. Icons + physics is a hoot.
I was going to play around with this last week, but then I read about how hard it fails when using remote desktop.
I saw a presentation of Anand Agarawala’s Masters Thesis in the summer of 2006 at Toronto’s Demo Camp 6 (or TorDemoCamp 6). The idea that I have downloaded and run code based on that concept, and that it didn’t come out of some giant software conglomerate, is awesome!
oops. I meant it’s a great article.
I was in the beta, but I never really used it. Tried to, at first, but it’s simply too annoying to bother with. The fact that it’s just an app that runs and not a true explorer replacement doesn’t help things either. Novel, but ultimately useless unless you were raised to use such an interface or actually put some effort into transitioning over. It may come into it’s one once we get gesture and augmented reality tech a little more down the line but until then this is a toy and not of much use.
This computer desktop “improvement” appears to be for those who don’t have the good fortune of working in a cubicle, or perhaps for those who miss the warm embrace of their cloth walls when they return home each evening. Not since Microsoft BOB has an interface redesign been so innovative.
I remember seeing a tech/concept demo a few years back, and from seeing the video it must have evolved into this consumer product, but it’s much more stripped down than what you saw in the tech demo video
here’s an interesting review and discussion i read on it yesterday:
http://theappleblog.com/2009/04/09/bumptop-as-a-finder-replacement-unlikely/#more-21254
as an owner of a laptop with a multi-gesture touch pad i’m interested in seeing how this interface evolves.