Google has whipped out its whopping wallet o’wonga once again and bought up BumpTop, a super-snazzy multitouch 3D interface for the computer desktop.
If you’ve never seen BumpTop in action, you’re in for a treat as it adds an eye-candy-laden, interactive 3D interface to the desktop, letting you do clever things like ‘stick’ items to the virtual walls, put documents in stacks, and then flick through them like a deck of cards.
Multi-touch magic
There’s support for social-networking widgets, sticky notes, changeable viewpoints, photo-browsing, with the promise of turning the messiest of desktops into one groovy, multitouch-enabled virtual space.
We tried this out on our own machines a whole ago and have to say we found it all a little overwhelming, and soon returned to the duller – but more practical and productive – standard flat UI, but we’re sure others will enjoy wowing to the fabulous graphics.
Heading for Android?
Google haven’t announced what they intend to do with all this whizz-bang technology, although it’s been suggested that it could form the basis of a makeover for the rather flat mobile Android interface.
Check out the video of it in action below, and if you like the look of it, you’ve got a week to download it from here for free: bumptop.com/download.
[BumpTop]
I had a little play with Bumptop. At first it was amusing. I at one point I found myself being ordered to ‘Buy a Goldfish’ – on a default Sticky Note. Then I foolishly I gave it permission to access my Facebook account. This was fine at first but soon crashed the computer – not really Bumptop’s fault but that it fired up Firfox my default browser without asking me, and my Firefox set-up doesn’t like Facebook.
Next time I switched on my machine I wanted to uninstall Bumptop. Unfortunately it fired itself up straight away and that combined with ZoneAlarm doing a scan used up a lot of resources on my low memory computer so that the uninstall took several minutes.
I can’t see much point in this application really – I don’t spend enough time on the desktop to need a new utility for it.
I love the look, but it’s all a bit too much. I’ve got a powerful PC but I can’t justify wasting CPU cycles on all that eye candy.