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Bumptop Beta
I got invited to the Bumptop Beta last week and I have to say my initial impressions weren’t the greatest.
When I first heard of this concept by Anand Agarawala, I was really excited at the potential of this new desktop environment. He was even invited to TED to display his thesis project to the greatest minds on the planet. But what I downloaded and what he displayed were two very different interfaces.
In the TED talks the user was able to resize the icons in an analog fashion, they were able to make the icons rigid or free moving, they were able to make shelves out of icons and stack other icons on top of them, but this was not the experience I was able to get from BumpTop Beta.
While the animation of BumpTop icon resizing was smooth, the ability to re size was incremental and lacked the limitless feeling demonstrated at TED. The icons also did not spin as freely as the ones in the demonstration, they more or less conformed to a grid with provided wiggle room to create the illusion of clutter. It was possible to post pictures to the wall of the BumpTop environment but was not able to create the ’shelves’ that were included in the demo. When editing notes or prompted dialogue boxes like an outlook alert, the left edge of my BumpTop overlay became transparent exposing the windows desktop. This is likely because widescreen support has not been fully implemented. The list of grievances is long at this stage in the game but I’m still confident the BumpTop team will be able to pull it off.
I had my misgivings about the interface, but keep in mind this is just a Beta. It really is worth while playing around with if you can get an invite, but in the end its just an overlay for your desktop and really doesn’t help you all that much if your desktop is pristine like mine (no icons to be seen here). Everything created, copied or deleted only affects your desktop right now, but I hope this could eventually become a replacement for explorer in general. Every file folder being its own room and its contents interactive icons.
Cheers,
Tarandon
Google: New Favicon?
I just noticed this today. If it is new, I like. If not, I still like.
Cheers,
Tarandon
Update: Looks like it’s not new, the folks over at Blogoscoped noticed this too!
Palm Finally Introduces a new OS
Today Palm revealed news at CES that it had finally completed its latest operating system; and I have to say I’m excited.
The new operating system is called Palm WebOS. Somewhat predictably this operating system is designed to be really easy for web developers to design applications for. If you happen to know X/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create applications for this new operating system.
What this means for the mobile market, is that right out of the gate there are potentially millions of developers available for this system with all the knowhow required to get an application up an running in as little as 3 days.
What’s even more exiciting is the user experience design for this new operating system. Palm has created a device that’s really open to developers while at the same time being fairly sophisticated in its ability to seamlessly integrate information from several sources simultaneously without duplications. This means that your contact list from outlook, gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc. can all be integrated on the same device without any hiccups or format incompatibility issues. In short, I think they’ve acheived what google was trying to do with Android, except Palm seems to have pulled it off with a whole lot more class than the Big G.
That being said, I still have some concerns over the application interface being web based. To me this seems like an opportunity for people to develop self installing applications of a malicious nature through link hijacking and the like. I really hope Palm has thought far enough into the future to prevent these possibilities from coming to reality.
I think Palm deserves a Kudos from the tech community for sticking it out so long and innovating in a market that seemed to have all the angles covered (or at least have people with patents that claim to cover the area Palm has ventured into). On that note, let the lawsuits begin. I suspect there will be some litigation in the near future.
Congratulations Palm!
Cheers,
Tarandon
2.7 Uploaded
Well, the 2.7 Install went off without a hitch, except the zip extracted to the wrong directory. easily fixed however, and we’re back on track. To my amazement the plugins all seemed to work. and right now I’m trying out the QuickPress Widget in the corner of the dashboard. I’m immediately frustrated by the lacking option to choose my categories. Save as a draft.
Okay, now in the new editor, which is finally fluid enough to give me a decent typing area. I also like the collapseable sidemenu on the left for added space. I really appreciate all the AJAX effects they seem to incoporated into this release.
For free software this is really slick.
I’ll do some more playing around when time permits.
Cheers,
Hank Green’s got it right!
I just finished reading Hank Green’s post over at EcoGeek.org where he outlines some of the problems with the 15 year old Kyoto Protocol. I think he’s got it right, so I’m spreading the word!
Cheers!
Tarandon
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