BumpTop, Where Have You Been All My Life?
Posted Tuesday, February 13th, 2007, at 10:37 am Eastern by Mark Wallace
I can’t believe the YouTube clip above has been up there for six months and I’ve only just found it now. I no longer want a touchscreen, now I want a BumpTop interface (which got Dugg a couple of weeks ago and is now all over the Internet, of course). Watch the video above. It contains some of the only truly new GUI techniques I’ve seen in a long time. Touchscreens are extra cool, but they really only give you new ways to do what you’re already doing with a mouse and keyboard. The BumpTop actually gives you useful new ways to easily organize information visually and in three dimensions. Very, very exciting.
TrackbackURL: http://www.3pointd.com/20070213/bumptop-where-have-you-been-all-my-life/trackback/
Feeds
http://www.bassictech.com/blogs/bassictech_news_blog/archive/2007/01/20/remapping-the-universe-using-this-gui.aspx
partway in when they are messing with the photos, you can see the guy on the right select several photos, and manipulate them with a pie menu that appears similar to the bumptop desktop. It’s not 3d, but hey, what’s stopping us from making it 3d in the same way bumptop is, but using fingers instead of pens?
It seems to me that this is the kind of stuff the Beryl and Compiz projects (or Gnome and KDE fo rthat matter) should be focusing on. The animated windows that everyone is drooling over now are nice but this kind of UI evolution is necessary, not to mention far more natural. I would expect the open source kids to embrace the challenge and make it happen.
[…] BumpTop, Where Have You Been All My Life? […]
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! PIE
Way back, when I was a mere spotty sutend not a spotty metaverse evangelist I saw some film of the first xeroc parc desktops. They had physics as part of the desktop. If you threw a piece of paper it glided away as in a real desk. It also had some executive toys such as a gravitational based planets orbiting gizmo so I was getting flashback time.
Its good to see this. I love the messy tidy widget, thats very me.
Combine it with those awesome multitouch displays like Jeff Han showed and we have some REAL Wow.
Well, I was all excited about this, too, but then I remembered I had real paper on my real desk that I could pick up and put places for a lot less money this thing is likely to cost. I could also mail it for 39 cents, too.
I can’t help suspecting that the pile of PDF files I would carelessly throw in the corner would begin to get importunate, after awhile, with this system, which will probabably be some pervasive lifelogging thing too some day, and it will say “organize us…or else…we will organize ourselves…and WE know better…” And you know something? I’d let them, and then, well, that’s where it all ends. The end of human will and freedom.
This is pretty impressive actually, and it has gorgeous animations.
But still, I think I’m not getting the point still, why would I want to simulate real life desktop management, instead of using a conventional desktop interface.
I think this has some pretty useful concepts, but the main one is a step back in usability.
Keeping icons in an invisible grid, ordered by whatever you like more, is way more useful than actually simulating real life desktop mess. I admit it, it would be fun playing around with this thing, but I wouldn’t never replace my conventional interface.