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 ummm… GAY “hip-hop overview”) if you want to see BumpTop in action; unfortunately for Linux users, BumpTop seems to be Windows-only.
As I’ve seen it described on another blog, “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.”
Also a visually similar project called lowfat, with an equally impressive video demo, is being developed — with enough sponsorship, the guys working on lowfat say it will go open source.
At first glance, it looks like your standard brush, but upon closer inspection you’ll find integrated LEDs, touch sensors, and a camera. The I/O Brush basically “lifts up and captures photons”, allowing artists to draw with “special ink” picked up from their immediate environment.
It looks like with Boot Camp, Apple just jumped into the gaming market. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a post about how the author installed World of Warcraft on his 17″ iMac Core Duo, and no surprises here, it runs better than on a normal PC. This brings up an interesting point, whilewe’veheard that Apple’s hardware is clearly out-performing its counterparts designed to run Windows XP, are game enthusiasts going to make the leap to Apple’s hardware?
Mac users can now buy the “PC Only” titles that they couldn’t in the past, and more importantly, Apple can compete with other high-end PC makers, such as Alienware, which was recently snapped up by Dell, within the gaming market. The market is saturated with low cost PCs, but I believe there is some room for one more in the high-end market. Apple’s name is synomous with high-quality products, looks like the competition has someone else to worry about.
More on Intel-Mac/Windows XP game performance at TUAW.com
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.
