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

Michael Blastland’s article re-enforces for me why my sister’s point of view is the wrong one to take.  Herd mentality is why the same party gets elected even though nobody want’s it.  Here in Canada we have 4-6 parties represented in any given riding.  The number of people I talk to who say to me “I’d like to vote for party X but I don’t want party Y to get elected; So I’m voting for party A to make sure they don’t” is astonishing.  Everyone votes defensively to try and prevent some party from getting elected and chooses a party they don’t agree with because they think everyone else will.  This is the herd mentality at work, and what it ends up doing is electing a government that nobody actually wants, with local representatives most people don’t agree with.

I think the point that Michael leaves out of his article though, is that the herd mentality is psychologically reinforcing.  When people like my sister vote for a winning candidate she might not agree with, there is still a sense of gratification in correctly choosing the person who wins.  A sense of victory for defeating the candidate she wanted to lose.  The shortsightedness of having elected a candidate she didn’t really want in the first place gets lost in the gratification of victory or success.  But that’s only half of the reason a herd mentality prevails.

The other half is that when we’re wrong, we can’t be singled out for the mistake.  We have handy excuses like “Nobody saw it coming!” to dilute the responsibility of making a bad decision.  Being wrong isn’t so bad when everyone else is wrong too.  It’s not fear of wrongness that leads people to move with the herd, it’s the fear of feeling isolated that comes from being the only one making the big mistake.  Others have noted this of course (seen here) but people continue to be powerless against these social pressures.

In this sense being wrong is only an illusion that appears when a comparision is made between one choice and the choice of everyone else.  If the comparison is removed the only evaluation of wrong or right is how the decision impacts the individual, and that’s where my reasoning comes from.  The only mechanism I have to ensure my views are represented is to vote for the candidate that best represents them, regardless of the consideration of eveyrone else.

This is why I voted for a party the herd told me I shouldn’t.  Because if it comes down to being wrong or supporting a the success of a party that doesn’t represent me, I choose to be wrong.

Cheers,

Tarandon

P.S. My candidate didn’t win