If you’re interested in computer desktop software, or how metaphors apply in software interfaces, or in “cool” programs that wow your friends … you should check out BumpTop. The bad news is all they have is a slick little demo video, and unless someone hires them to continue working on it, there’s no guarantee this will ever be a product. The good news is that they have a mailing list you can sign up for if you’re interested in beta testing it.
Honestly, I think the icons need some work in this, they’re ridiculously generic in the version he’s showing off in the video (as in: no way to tell one PDF from another PDF), which for me would completely break the program. I would want a faster easier way to “open” the piles without waiting for the pile plugin menu to show up (and I’ve never been a big fan of fisheye menus). That said … the way the drag-select works, and animations for draggins groups of files, and the stacking and pile plugins … are very cool, and just the sort of stuff I’d like to add to the desktop.
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Short answer: Looks cool, but it’s not useful.
Long answer:
I have this really advanced system where I put related files into groups via a fantastic new tool that I call ‘folders’. Then when I want a file of a certain type, or belonging to a certain project, I open up the ‘folder’ for that project and all the files are there.
Okay, I’m being sarcastic, but having to drag my files around on my desktop to different areas is less efficient than putting them in folders. Even the real desk has file folders for this very reason.
Yes, but even though you have folders on your real desk, sometimes you leave things out on the desk so you can find them fast because you’re working on related projects, or to remind you to finish them up, or to read them. And the stacks (specifically the ease with which you could see everything in a stack, and then re-stack it) make it even easier to see/find/examine the stuff on this virtual desktop than on your real desktop.
Now, I’m still not sure this is actually useful: it doesn’t account for the fact that the main reason I keep things on my real desktop is so that I can see them while I’m working in an application on my computer that fills the whole screen. And it doesn’t even begin to think about the fact that the real problem is that my screen desktop is too small (even with two monitors) to have more than two or three documents be usefully visible at a time …
I still think my DeskOps concept for organizing documents is going in the right direction, and the I’ll not be using any fancy DirectX desktops until we see something that will actually run under my other apps without slowing them down … but I can’t help but think that if you had real “live previews” of the documents involved, and if you could “zoom” on them and flip through them, shuffle, and reorganize them … then you’d finally have something that began to approach the utility of an actual physical desk, but with encryption and password protection
Great , I like BumpTop !
But where can I download it ?!
Can anyone told me?
Thx!
yeah…where the hellz can i find this i really want it but i cant find it…where do i get it?
You can’t. A far as I know this is nothing but a tech demo so far.
There is something similar called real desktop.
There is also tile ui which is basically the samething, only in flash.
hope this works
http://tileui.com/nobodycanguessthisurl/tileui_flickr.swf
That’s pretty slick. Not exactly as slick as BumpTop, but at least we can play with it