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