343. Followup: BumpTop
Uncategorized — By Dmitry Podolsky on April 8, 2009 at 10:45 pm
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Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.
Just wanted to let you know that BumpTop finally went public – that is, you don’t need to be invited to the private beta to have fun with you desktop. The version 1.0 can be downloaded for free on the BumpTop website.
8 Comments
I will download and try it – next week or so. The visual effects have a wow effect. But I think that those guys are not doing the science – what actually helps the people and what people like and need to use.
The smooth transitions with the pictures etc. are surely cool. But we already have test cases of similar technologies. For example, Vista (more than Home Basic Edition) has Task Switch 3D, WindowsKey/Tab.
It browses through the running applications in a nice 3D way. It is surely prettier than the ordinary Task Switch 2D with the 2D thumbnails. And I used to have Task Switch 3D even on XP, with a Windows XP Power Toy. But the fact is that I am not using Task Switch 3D in the real life. And I am afraid that most Vista users don’t use it, either.
There are other issues about the mess on the desktop, allowing arbitrary positions, sizes, and angles of the items. It is surely “realistic”. However, is that useful? I just don’t believe it. Once again, there are similar examples that have been tested in reality, like “sort to grid” of the icons on the normal Windows desktops.
It seems clear to me that the people who don’t use the grid to sort things end up with complete chaos on their desktop. And people whose desktop stays productive eventually switch to the grid, anyway.
Analogously, the comment that folders should no longer have names is just terrible. It can never help not to be able to look at the content of something in a systematic, transparent way. It never helps not to be able to address thing according to its name.
Indeed, the names for each folder etc. is what computers forced us to do. The duty doesn’t exist in the real life. So this invention is “artificial”. But it is a good thing, too. Something’s being very realistic is a completely different characteristic than something’s being very useful and productive. The pre-computer-age everyday life technologies are simply not optimally productive and pleasant. That’s the basic thing that many of these people seem to misunderstand.
The number of operations that one can do with those things seems too high, too. In fact, it is likely that most people won’t learn all of them. They can get to situations that are unfamiliar. That’s a bad thing for a graphical interface, too. A user-friendly interface should always offer a learnable set of functions only.
Dear Lubos,
That’s a theorist’s talking
Just install it and play with it for a couple of days, then you’ll see whether it is artificial or not – for me, it is rather natural (to the point that maybe I’ll buy their commercial version).
It would be great to hear your first (and second
) impressions after you play with it.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
I’ve played with BumpTop Free for 10 minutes now. The tutorial was cool. It is sexy, the gridding, piling etc. is pretty natural.
But when I was given my usual desktop in the BumpTop view, it was just uglier than reality. The different sizes of the icons – as in 3D perspective – kind of suck when you’re supposed to work with it. More general, the icons are not as pretty if they’re small to start with. In this sense, the Apple trick of zooming the icons that are close to the mouse pointer could be helpful.
I returned to the normal desktop soon but will surely keep this thing, at least to show some advanced fun to others.
Another funny thing was that folders on desktop could have been viewed, but when opening their subfolders, I got Windows Explorer back.
Moreover, I didn’t get the usual options – like grouping by type – when I viewed folders on the desktop. This is how I use Windows Explorer all the time so I couldn’t switch to something that doesn’t group by type. It would be a huge step back for me. I believe that grouping by type should be the default choice in Windows Explorer and other file managers.
As a game or a proof of concept, it’s OK, but as a ready technology to be used in real life, so far not. By the way, games can do many related things that are much more impressive today. So if one compared BumpTop with games, it wouldn’t necessarily score too well. It’s unusual or cool to put this game 3D approach to a mundane context like a file manager – but being unusual is different from being a useful or good idea, in my understanding.
Dear Dmitry, I don’t quite understand your concept of a “project” that doesn’t have subfolders. More precisely, I can understand such a “project” but I can’t understand how to organize all files in such a way. For example, there is a folder (Mathematica) “2009″ on my desktop, one of those that are used relatively often but that are not accessible directly from the Windows Start menu – Documents, Pictures, Music etc. – where you would to get too far to get there.
It’s a shortcut but it doesn’t really matter.
While many files are directly in this “2009″ folder, it has subfolders, like “Climate” (besides Relativity, Dualities-Singularities, Calabi-Yau etc.). And of course, “Climate” has subfolders, too, like “Antarctica”. It seems completely clear to me that such an organization is very natural, and these sub-sub-subfolders are not contrived in any way. On the contrary, it is natural to create e.g. a “temp” subfolder within Antarctica.
Let me stop with these examples. The hierarchical structure of folders is a completely essential, natural feature of all disk-based operating systems that has been around for 30+ years, that is completely inevitable for pretty much every user and every program (and every computer or HTTP web server, and even for many cell phones) we are using these days, and sacrificing this feature just in order to have a three-dimensional wall would look completely crazy to me.
There exist essential things, and there exist visual superficial details. Three-dimensional walls clearly belong to the second category while subfolders belong to the first one.
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