BumpTop

As a part of the Science Rendezvous “festivities”, I’ll be demo-ing the BumpTop application on one of the SmartBoards (its essentially a single-touch whiteboard screen) that we have at UofT.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with BumpTop, BumpTop is “is a fun, intuitive 3D desktop that keeps you organized and makes you more productive. Like a real desk, but better.”  Its basically a really cool way to organize and use your home desktop.  Check out more information at their website: http://bumptop.com/

For those who have been following BumpTop, its no longer in closed-beta; there is a free-trial version of  it that you can download and play around with.  Sorry Mac/Linux fans, this is Windows only.

Now that I’ve finished all my exams, I’ve taken the time to try out the software (you know, before I actually use it in front of people on Saturday) on my home computers.  I tried installing BumpTop on my X200; it installs fine but it runs pretty sluggishly.  I’m pretty sure its because of the X200′s Intel integrated graphics; its probably too weak to handle BumpTop’s physics/eye-candy.  I also found it a bit difficult to perform the lasso gestures using only the Trackpoint (a.k.a. nipple).

I’ve also tried installing BumpTop on my home desktop as well, and it runs quite smoothly.  My first impressions of BumpTop is that it is definately a feast for the eyes.  Going through the tutorial, you get to see all the fancy cool features that BumpTop has: zoom in on walls and pictures, lasso & stack icons, fire off pictures and tweets by dragging images to the special canvases; the list goes on and on.  However, as with most software, it does have its fair share of annoyances.  For one, you can easily create piles using the lasso and cross gesture, but to break a pile, you have to right-click on the pile to break it.  You’d think you would be able to break the pile by doing an action similar to the lasso and cross…

And as for increasing productivity, well, geez, once you go into that area you’re going to start fights with the monoliths of productivity (launchers like Quicksilver,  plain old vanilla command line terminal, OS X’s Smart Folders, etc.).

Anyways, I’m not going to say much more beyond that; I’ve only been using this thing on and off for a couple of days so I don’t think its fair to judge it so quickly.