BumpTop, Pushing the Desktop Metaphor 213
Alranor writes "BumpTop is a new way of manipulating your GUI desktop with a graphics pen. Documents can be moved and piled (among other actions) as if they were real pieces of paper on a physical desktop. Simulated real physical interactions, such as documents pushing others out of the way as you move them around, are intended to increase the intuitiveness of the layout tool. Given the messiness of my desks at work and home, I'm not so sure this will work for me, but it's an interesting idea."
There's a neat video demo linked from the site (and a "hip-hop overview") if you want to see BumpTop in action; unfortunately for Linux users, BumpTop seems to be Windows-only. As reader idangazit describes it, this is "not just another "me-too" alternative UI; a lot of effort and polish has been put into the (pen-based) interaction, resulting in a very natural way of interacting with collections of information. Less sci-fi than Minority Report, but far more likely to hit a desktop near you in the next few years." Update: 06/22 16:55 GMT by T : As zdzichu reader points out in the comments below, a visually similar project called lowfat, with an equally impressive video demo, is being developed — with enough sponsorship, lowfat will go open source.
Impressive, but usability?.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Features such as the LassoMenu look awesome, but in all honesty, I can't see how I could apply it enough to be proactive.
Of course, developement of such technologies is always a good thing, and its good eye-candy if only that
Re:Impressive, but usability?.. (Score:5, Interesting)
On a more 'futuristic' note: Wouldn't it be cool to have a desk like in The Island [imdb.com] where the doctor brought up their files ON his desk. Now image a big desk with a touch panel as its face. This technology would be pretty cool. Pile up your documents, open them and a virtual keyboard/mouse appears.
Re:Impressive, but usability?.. (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. Really thinking outside the box there.
Re:Impressive, but usability?.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Impressive, but usability?.. (Score:2)
Re:Impressive, but usability?.. (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I can tell, it's a more sensible way of ordering documents. What I'd like to see is an approach where the documents are represented by thumbnails rather than just icons.
Although it looks overly-complex, bear in mind that this is research. They're trying out all the possibilities to see which ones "fit". I reckon a refined version of this interface could be very good indeed.
MS Bob, is that you? (Score:4, Interesting)
tm
Re:Impressive, but usability?.. (Score:2)
And Mac users... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And Mac users... (Score:3, Funny)
Why emulate old technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole point of having a computer is to free yourself from paper. So why would you take a step back and try to digitally emulate a system that is antiquated? A computer offers endless opportunities for organizing and storing data, I see this as a step back.
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2, Insightful)
Countless times. On a computer AND on paper. On a computer, so what? It's easy to search when needed. On paper? Now that really sucks. That's one reason I hate paper. Print it, and it's lost.
Oh, and that is true for "neatly organized" and "not organized at all" (AKA "huge pile"). Organizing just makes searching easier to avoid and easier to do.
Unfortunately, "n
Google as an unsorted pile of papers? (Score:2)
Meanwhile imagine google as a giant messy pile
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2, Insightful)
> back and try to digitally emulate a system that is antiquated? A computer offers endless
> opportunities for organizing and storing data, I see this as a step back.
Also, I don't actually have many "documents" on my "desk top". There are a few pieces of paper on my desk. I don't really much them around very much though.
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes the UI has to take a step back because there are users out there who find it hard to take the step forward.
I agree that it's a bad idea to limit your thinking to physical metaphors if you can reasonably think in a similar way to the way
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
They print out an excel document with 3 cells so they can "read" it. No joke one time the 1st VP printed out an email I sent him that had a 6 digit order count, and no other text... he read it out loud, then threw it in the recycling. They keep giant boxes of paper docs that are printed off from our document management system, and are easily retrievable. We have a 100% paperless system, and at any given time the users have 10-20 sheets of paper on their desks, all of them digitally accessable.
I don't have any paper on my desk, haven't since the early 1990s, but this advancement is not intended for me. It is for "Joe Paper-Lover"
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no technophobe, but I always have at least one paper document on my desk at work. Why? Firstly, because then I can free up my monitor for more important things like my text editor, and secondly because I can scrawl all over a paper document with my handy ballpoint pen much more easily than I can annotate an electronic document using my mouse and keyboard.
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
It kills me what "metaphors" make it and the ones that don't.
The whole WYSIWY_M_G (_M_ == may) thing is inferior to WISIWIG (what I say is what I get). Also, things like stickies, notes, scribbles in margins are required for both within documents as well as to be appended to their icons, but we don't get that. We get a pen that, like the mous
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2, Insightful)
Auditors love paper (Score:2)
Can you modify paper records? Sure. Can you prevent digital records from being changed (or at least provide for a tr
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
Metaphor is a literary term comeing from the Greek: to carry over. It's not the how much you carry over (the realism), but the usefulness of whatever makes it through. Usually the less excess baggage you carry over, the better.
The file cabinet metaphor is useful because people want to be able to find things by an indexing attribute (e.g. client name). However, you don't need to carry over the fact that physical files can only be filed in one place.
Like
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
Physical limitations are absurd. (Score:5, Insightful)
And then of course, you have to deal with the extra processing costs inherent in such a desktop. It may look pretty, but behind it you have to have the CPU doing plenty of physics calculations, the GPU doing rendering, anti-alwhich could slow down a slow system with a cluttered desktop.
My biggest gripe with this, however, is the fact that the icons all look the same. I don't want to have to memorize the placement of documents on my desktop (even though I often do so through simple habit, anyway), and these icons barely indictate file type, much less name, which I find to be a huge handicap. Without file names on the desktop, things get confusing rather quickly.
A final gripe I have is that, if we must use a pen-type device, does that mean we're switching from a pen to a mouse whenever we want to use an application that's incompatable/inconvenient when using this software?
The technology is interesting, but I doubt its practical use.
Re:Physical limitations are absurd. (Score:2)
If not overdone, it could be more intuitive. If icons are constantly in your way, that's an immedi
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
I can't wait till this is ported to my cellphone ! Or to a screen grafted on one of my toenails !
If it's smaller, it has to be better, right ?
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of having a computer is to free yourself from paper.
No, it isn't. The whole point of having a computer is to make tedious and repetitive tasks easier. The "paperless office" hype was just a way to promote the use of computers ("cut costs by reducing the amount of paper used"). Or maybe it was just the standard answer given to business people by computer salesmen: "What can you do with it? Well, uh, I don't know, you'll have to spend a lot less money on paper?"
So why would you take a step
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
This is one of the "endless opportunities" for organizing and storing data. It's another way to visualize it...may work well for some and not well for others. I don't see myself using it, but I'm sure the concept would be useful to some.
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
Re:Why emulate old technology? (Score:2)
Because it might still be a useful metaphor for the way people actually organize things. You can dump what you were just working on into the appropriate pile and it'll be there when you get back.
People (myself included) don't organize things in our br
Papercuts? (Score:4, Funny)
Can you still get papercuts?
Re:Papercuts? (Score:2, Funny)
The trouble is... (Score:5, Interesting)
As opposed (Score:2)
Re:The trouble is... (Score:4, Funny)
Hardware acceleration (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:2)
Hell yeah:
I think it's vitally important that this desktop metaphor be used in offices everywhere. I'll nominate my own office as a te
At a glance... (Score:5, Insightful)
I watched that video and the entire time I thought 'useless' until they showed the photos. There was also once a video of someone using multiple fingers to manipulate photographs, and I thought this would be useful as well. Neither of these systems can do much for me otherwise, though.
As for being Windows-only... I think that shows how short-sited these people are. Linux users are quite a bit more likely to embrace change than Windows users. But, maybe that's to our advantage. We can now design and implement a MUCH better and more useable system that was intelligently designed (I couldn't resist) instead of just what someone thought was cool.
If I had much free time, I would be working on it myself.
Re:At a glance... (Score:3, Insightful)
You *are* kidding, right? In my experience (both personal and based on comments here) Linux users tend to be the least flexible, most opposed to change people I've ever met. That's not to say that they *all* are, of course, but read any article here about KDE, Gnome, xgl, new HCI ideas, etc and you'll see a whole slew of comments deriding it, with a l
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
I agree with most of what you said, but make (and Ant) are better than letting the IDE build the project, because you can more easily tell what's going on and have better control over the build process.
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
We get all the nice features of a proper code-aware editing environment (real-time error flagging, refactoring support, code structure browsing, etc), with the power and control of ant.
Don't get me wrong, I used to use vi and make exclusively; I just have no desire to go back.
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
Yeah, I know -- I wasn't complaining about the IDE itself.
I'm just cranky because I have to use Visual Studio at work and have to deal with the stupid opaque .vcproj and .sln files. I wish we could switch to Nant...
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
Oh, everyone's a LITTLE afraid. Evolution made sure of that. But people that are using Linux came from one of 2 groups: People that had to learn Unix/Linux for work, and people that decided to change (
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
Yeah, why would they settle for selling to 90% of the desktop market when they could have given it away to 10%? What morons! :-)
Okay, kidding aside, surely you can see why a commercial vendor might want to go for the big fish first, and save the Mac & *nix ports for later? Even if Linux users were 5x more likely (a made-up number) to embrace something new, that still leaves twice as many potential customers for a Windo
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
- Even if Linux users like the change, they already have plenty of desktop managers to play with. Also Destkop Manager choice in Linux seems to have become a religious question those days.
- Linux users are no used to pay ( yeah nobody "likes" to pay, but at least Windows user are "familiar" with the idea ) A business looks at the market size it can catch but also looks at what price the market buy something. If it needs to sell 2 times cheaper to linux users, they need a 2
Lowfat (Score:2, Informative)
It was a simple start of an Linux app in wich you could manipulate photo's very much like this app.
Found it! => Lowfat [thepimp.net]
Re:At a glance... (Score:3, Informative)
Aperture [apple.com] lets you do something like this: you can arbitrarily arrange photos on a workspace (light table).
Re:At a glance... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:At a glance... (Score:2)
Linux users like to embrace change, but what we like even more is being productive. And managing your computer desktop the way you manage your phys
Star Trek 42 (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I want my computer to be *better* organized than my desk, not worse.
Re:Star Trek 42 (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine it! Documents and photos and games and toys stretching out for virtual miles! You'll have to code a flight sim just to see all your data!
Then might as well add topography to represent groups of data. A gleaming ivory tower for academic research. A giant drive-in for movies and tv files. A dystopian city structure for work related folders. A dark ocean for the internet, full of dangers and terrors and fun. A huge cave would lead into the purgatory of your "recycle bin" files, where they wait to be reborn or fed to the maw of no return.
memory palace (Score:2)
Re:Star Trek 42 (Score:2)
The thing that I don't get about projects like this is that they seem to fail to recognize that "possible in real life" is not the same thing as "desirable in a computer interface." For example, you can pile papers and such in real life. That's great, I can. But the piles get hard to keep track of and ar
Keepin' It Real? (Score:5, Funny)
Need to clean my glasses (Score:5, Funny)
Appropriate if you're in a situation where you have to pull numbers out of your ass, though.
Simple Pleasures (Score:3, Insightful)
It just wouldn't be the same if it was ALL technology. I like to touch things with my hands. I like getting a pile of documents in my hands and banging the sides so they all align. I like dumping a big pile of papers onto someone I don't like's desk. Ink stains on a white shirt, I could do without though.
Re:Simple Pleasures (Score:2)
It's impossible to see enough of it to do the job, without having the details impossibly small. Therefor, I print them.
When challenged on my going against the "paperless concept" I usually ask for a 3x3 array of monitors view the work order at a useable size. No one has yet taken me up on that.
Sometimes what works in the physical world doesn't translate easily to the virtual world.
Wrong way around (Score:5, Funny)
"They're coming around when?!"
*select all -> drag into single folder*
Re:Wrong way around (Score:2)
cd Desktop/cleanup/cleanup/cleanup2/cleanup/April_cl
Crumpled slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
News for nerds. Stuff that crumples.
---
Accommodation for students [letsuni.org]
Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this is a research project, and some of its results may find their way into mainstream UIs. For example, I could think of a variation of the lasso menu. Draw a lasso using the mouse over a couple of files, then pull up, and a directory is created with all marked files in it.
Preview is your friend (Score:2)
Re:Problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Problems (Score:2)
Yeah, and to ease the pain of driving a car, car designers first tried using reigns like horses instead of pedals and steering wheels.
Sounded good at
Re:Problems (Score:2)
I don't see how this product provides that kind of crutch, though.
The computer desktop will still be a finite 2-dimensional plane on a screen. The interaction of elements within it will still be virtualized, not physical. Is it going to help that much for individual elements to be "sheets of paper" rather than "windows"? The window metaphor has been in popular use
Re:Problems (Score:2)
Advocates of abandoning containers neglect to note that with the exception of the device name, file paths are just metadata, with the last fe
Re:Problems (Score:2)
Even though my office is messy, to a large extent I know where things are. I'm not denying that things sometimes get lost, but I do know that if a well-meaning person straightens up and organizes my office when I'm away, when I return I will experience a sense of panic and become lost for days trying to find things. The point is that there is a subtle order to the mess, that makes sense only to me. Sure, it's not
Long Term Storage (Score:5, Funny)
A step backwards (Score:2)
Dual Screen (Score:5, Interesting)
The mouse needs to be replaced by a touch screen with a stylus.
Re:Dual Screen (Score:2)
The mouse needs to be replaced by a touch screen with a stylus.
Try out a Tablet PC.
I have a Toshiba Tecra M4 and I'd love to have the option of using this desktop interface. I was doing some research into a topic the other night and I ended up with about 9 web browsers, half a dozen PDFs and a couple of spreadsheets. Being able to see them all on a virtual desktop like this would be far cooler than Alt-Tabbing around or having to poke around on the task bar...
D.
Re:Dual Screen (Score:2)
Theres a very simple game in the Nintendo DS Mario 64 where a flower appears and you start plucking the petals away with the stylus (love-me, love-me-not). That was it. The effect of plucking the petal with the stylus and when release (lift the stylus) the petal gently floats down or you can even toss-it sideways. Nintendo knows that something big happens when machines start understanding and mimicking the human movement
Re:Dual Screen (Score:2)
First.. eh never mind (Score:3, Funny)
Look at the bigger picture. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with these kinds of technology demos is that many people view them as an end product, and then write them off without considering how they might fit into a larger environment. Besides, isn't part of the usefulness of computers to be able to perform tasks virtually that could not otherwise be done in the physical world? If such function is provided in an intuitive way, then it makes computing more seamless and useful.
Re:Look at the bigger picture. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why I think 'the pile' has never taken off. To really work it requires a robust data driven file system. For instance, we now use a folder metaphor to represent related catagories to materials. We have
Just make sure you don't open any windows... (Score:2, Funny)
Bumptop by analogy should mean (Score:2)
This is definitely one for the people who brought you the polka dot iMac.
It should be pastel colored, and have a speaker in the base to play suitable noises to the fetus while mother to be works from home.
My concept video (Score:3, Funny)
Too little too late (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally, an OS for managers (Score:4, Interesting)
Same goes for when managers start using a computer, I mean, the O.N./O.F.F. switch escapes them sometimes, and higher level concepts such as organizing files in folders is just too far beyond their capabilities.
So, an OS desktop that lets you see all your files and folders looking like pieces of paper and folders (I bet they even have email looking like envelopes too!) on a desktop that allows you to pile them up and look like stacks of paper and folders and envelops, what a concept!!!!
I guess ICONS that look like paper and folders that you can place anywhere on your desktop isn't good enough. It requires too much thought to associate an icon with a file or a folder. A picture of a piece of paper on a square is too hard to rationalize as being a document.
This is a revolutionary GUI concept and I can't wait for OS X or Windows to implement this idea as using computers today, with those pesky abstract icons, is just too darn hard, at least for managers.
What we really need is a x-platform desktop API (Score:3, Interesting)
The interface is just another app. Once we get that, we'll be rockin'.
Re:What we really need is a x-platform desktop API (Score:2)
Bob by any other name is still Bob. (Score:5, Insightful)
Balance (Score:4, Interesting)
So here's the deal: an ideal inferface will basically have a structure (i.e.: a logical framework of relationships) closely resembling the real world, but will operate at a speed unhindered by real-world mechanics like intertia, momentum, and spatial constraints. The existing folder+desktop system has been a natural, maybe even unconcscious, evolution towards precisely such a model.
Personally, I think as long as we're missing a dimension - if we're in 2D instead of 3D - then we're not going to have a completely intuitive interface. The problem, though, is that true 3D still isn't really available. We just have 2D emulation of 3D on computer monitors.
So these kinds of fancy 3D interfaces that have physics engines, collision detection, and all that stuff are sort of wasted in my mind until we have a really immersive 3D display system. I feel exactly the same way about FPS games. I'm a gamer, but I'm crushed that VR never took off. There's just no true feeling of immersion if you're stuck staring at your zillion-polygon virtual world through a tiny 19" porthole.
Could be a great interface for games (Score:3, Interesting)
Why replicate a desktop? (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting, but not new. (Score:2)
This is a TRANSITIONAL tool (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of what we all are failing to consider here is that we need desktop managers because the desktops on our copmputers are comparatively small to the desktops we actually work at in the real world, due to screen resolution restrictions vs. our ability to see things that are small. Face it. We are taking a 48" x 30-36" desk and trying to compress it onto a 17", 19", 21", 30" monitor IN MOST CASES. I know that most of us as geeks probably have two or three monitors on our desks, but if you compare that screen space relative to your real desk, it's like trying to run your office life off an end-table in your living room.
The problem isn't that computers can't replace paper, the problem is that we don't have the number of pixels for the average user to make that proposition appetizing to the average user. Everything we can do to improve that situation makes the dream of going paperless more reachable.
Re:This is a TRANSITIONAL tool (Score:2)
To go paperless we need one simply thing, cheap ePaper, and that has nothing to do with GUI or general interface design, since no matter how good your interfaces are getting, you need a big display for efficent paperless work, and not just 21" large, but something as large as the desk infront of which you sit, heck actually making the whole desk a display and the wall behind it a display would be a good idea. A
To much play and to little usablity (Score:3, Interesting)
To those interesting in new interface ideas I recomment to read The Humane Interface by Jef Raskins, who really does propose a new style of interface that is both a lot more intuitive then what we have today as well as a lot more efficient, instead of just adding bell and whistles like most other 'new' interfaces do.
lowfat (Score:4, Informative)
Re:lowfat (Score:2)
MPX should have an army of top teir coders supported by massive grants. It is the only innovative desktop project being coded right now.
Hasnt this gone on long enough? (Score:3, Interesting)
Its time to start inventing new metaphors.
-LM
Tablet PC interface (Score:2)
If we could actually interact with our computers like we do with real world obje
Re:This is an interesting concept for... (Score:2)