Bumptop is Cool

If you hadn't, erm, bumped into it before, then check out this Windows application. Bumptop is a very cool file management application. It's animated and "pretty", but there is substance to this style. I particularly like the piechart contextual menu.

Comments

[Vance]

I'm always glad to see innovative IxD approaches, so we can learn to think in new ways.

However, I'm not convinced that a 3d perspective mapped onto a 2d display and controlled with a 2d input device will ever be more efficient than a 2d perspective.

My inner devil's advocate says "but people have been playing 3d games for years with a mouse, and that seems to have worked out swimmingly". But I think that's a completely different paradigm. There, it's not about efficiency, or about economy of interaction, it's about immersion. Many games even purposely make interaction DIFFICULT as a gameplay mechanic.

In a similar sense, I think Bumptop is probably a more "immersive" desktop experience (if that word makes sense in this context), but I don't think that's an important attribute for desktop management.

[Steve Nicholson]

I'm not so sure I like the "piles" idea. Piles are just hidden clutter. I took a day off work yesterday and ended up spending the entire day going through all the real-world piles that have been accumulating around my house. Do I really want to transfer that to my computer?

[Keith Lang]

First up — I've never played with bumptop myself (I hope to soon) but being primarily on Mac I don't think I can give it a real 'live in' type trial until it's available on the Mac.

@Vance @Steve I totally agree that taking a 2D space (the desktop) and putting it into a 3D space doesn't necessarily add anything of value. There's been plenty of attempts at this in the last 30+ years, with nothing sticking.

However, I think there is value here:
- Giving much more fluid access to pile/folder/heirarchial structures is a big plus because it makes creating and restructuring these spaces more efficient
- afaict this is a better matching of space to information organization because it allows the use of perspective on documents. Seeing a document side-on is enough information to tell what it is, while using less visual space