Nearly three years ago, a video demo of a new desktop user interface, the BumpTop, captivated YouTube viewers. A year the creator later, Anand Agarawala, was called to the august TED conference to present. Now the BumpTop software is here, ready for you and your Windows PC. helperflower. It was given by me a spin. It's certainly very cool. In many ways it is a better desktop than the the one that comes with Windows (even Windows 7) or OS X. But as cool as it is, it feels like a toy. That's since the locus of modern personal computing is not the desktop. People are in apps and in the browser. BumpTop makes the desktop better, but so what? It won't make you more productive in your e-mail app, and it currently doesn't touch the Web browsing experience. BumpTop doesn't go deep enough into Windows to replace the way we work with information. Instead, it adds yet another interface to use in addition to the Windows utilities (like the file manager), your apps, and your Web browser. It's your desktop, but in messy and 3D. getmyfiles. With that curmudgeonly view on the table, let's look at the cool stuff that BumpTop does. Because even though it's a toy right now, you're going to want to try it. BumpTop makes the items on your computer's desktop more manageble and more like their real-world counterparts. You can fling folders (and icons) around, and they have weight, which is related to size, which indicates importance to you. Items grow when they are used by you more, or you can manually grow or shrink them. You can stack items into groups, view them as if they were pages in a written book, spread them out along arbitrary paths, or show them in nice square grids (boring). To work with items, you together lasso them. And of the typical instead, squared-off interface of a PC, where selection boxes are all rectangles, everything upright stays, and all icons are the same size, BumpTop lets you select items by drawing vague circles around them, and the icons can fly all over the accepted place, change sizes, and flip around. Things can be scattered around in a way that more closely resembles the real world. piratebaybuilding there. It may well not be square and clean, but thanks to subtle visual cues, like angle, size, and proximity, you'll probably discover a BumpTop desktop simpler to scan. For images that you have on your desktop, you get a nice viewer, complete with a vertiginous zoom in to pictures on your desktop when you click on them. Everything else opens up in its native Windows app. BumpTop uses "pie menus," circular wheels where the options are arrayed like pie slices. It's an easier system for your muscles to remember--you just flick your mouse or pen or finger in the direction of the option you want. masteradvertising. You also get "walls" on your desktop on which to pin things, a UI concept that works very well for reminder notes, photos, and destination apps. For example, you can fling a picture to the Facebook software that's pinned on a wall and it will post it to your account. There's also an e-mail icon, and a Twitter/Twitpic icon you can fling to. BumpTop uses the 3D accelerator in your PC. And in addition to giving your icons an imitation of physicality, it's gorgeous. However, while a 3D-accelerated desktop was new for Windows in 2006, today some of the Aero effects in Vista (and even moreso the effects in Windows 7) also use the graphics power of your PC to create spectacular visuals. The interface works fine with a mouse, but is better suited to a touch interface clearly. Lassoing and gesturing, and the pie menus particularly, appear created for touch controls. A multi-touch version will come when Windows 7 ships. BumpTop would be killer on a Surface computer. BumpTop makes for a great gee-whiz demo, and a cool desktop for a PC. Check out those pores: Skype goes high-def on this page. Beta testers have created dozens of visual environments for BumpTop already. I'd like to see the technology under the covers of BumpTop migrate to desktop OS interfaces and apps, and it'd be really interesting if developers started to make bumpable software and widgets for the platform. Will that ever happen? That's the challenge for Agarawala. He is talking to hardware manufacturers (he wouldn't say who, but I think the touchscreen notebook he used in the video demo gives a hint). He says, "BumpTop gives OEMs an ability to differentiate." And that's true, but you don't get broad developer adoption by releasing a product that runs on only one vendor's line, or that's on several but custom-made and different on each. For BumpTop to take off with developers, it needs broad distribution. It belongs in the operating system. Apple has filed a patent on concepts very similar to BumpTop. Skype gets SMS, file transfer for Windows Mobile on this page. The basic product shall be available as a free download, fortunately. There's also a pro version for $29 that has some extra features, such as the pile flipping support and function for unlimited sticky notes. indimediaget. The first 200 people that click here get the pro version free. Update: the free passes are all gone, sorry. Try the Download.com link at the end of this whole story. A future version might have some kind of a Web browser built into it. Webkit (the same technology used by Chrome and Safari) is embedded in BumpTop, not exposed to the user yet just. When a BumpTop malleable interface starts to work with Web pages directly, I shall be much more considering it. Meantime, BumpTop is worth a try. It's a lot of fun. On Wednesday, BumpTop is exclusively available for download courtesy of Download.com. Download BumpTop 1.0.
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