Tarandon's Blog » Technology

Bumptop Beta

Tarandon — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:06:22 +0000

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

2.7 Uploaded

Tarandon — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:16:04 +0000

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,

Fun with Flash

Tarandon — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:59:49 +0000

I just found out a really fun way to expand your flash vocabulary when coding in ActionScript 3.0. If you feel the need, try deleting some of the folders in the en\configuration\ActionScript 3.0\Classes\fl\ folder. This the situation I encountered on the computer I happened to be using in the computer lab. I realized that the only folders available for import were motion and transitions. This was a very interesting exercise. All the operators I’ve been used to using had been removed and I was limited to a much smaller sandbox. To my surprise I was still able to hack together a functional submission for my first assignment. It didn’t come out anywhere close to what I had originally planned but it worked nonetheless. While this normally would have been extremely frustrating I found the added challenge to be welcomed entertainment considering the subject matter of the lecture included how to distinguish between = and == when making statements. OMFG!!!

If you actually decide to do this; make sure of course to back everything up, you could probably just move the folders up a level and then return them when you’re done playing.

Cheers!

Tarandon