I needed a reason to blow the dust off my PC, and BumpTop was it. I’d seen the TED video last year and liked the look of it, but hadn’t realised its been available to download for quite a while now.

BumpTop is a 3D desktop-virtualisation program. It uses OpenGL 2 to render the contents of your desktop into a 3D space, allowing you to group your files & folders together in ‘piles’, pin images up on ‘walls’, and use gestures to manipulate the contents of the space.

Desktop UI has been stagnant for over a decade, and BumpTop purports to change all that. From the promo material it certainly seems innovative, with the demos of throw gestures to send files to the printer or trash, or dropping an image into the Facebook widget to upload it directly to your account. More impressive to me were the screencasts of multi-touch, which improves upon the iPhone’s gestures to really take advantage of your whole hand to drag, sift, flip and even crop your way around the desktop.

The test drive

So, firing up my desktop – which, with an Athlon 3200 and GeForce 6200 video card only just made the minimum specs – I was looking forward to trying it out. It installed fine, and I burned through the tutorials, and away I went.

I don’t pretend to be a usability expert, so I’m glad I could easily point out a few of the UI’s good parts. Rather than the typical method of dragging a rectangle around a series of icons to select them, you use a free-moving lasso, which makes it easier to select the ones you want. Equally useful are the radial menus, which are much clearer than Window’s huge list of contextual menu commands. There are some neat physics for interaction between files, such as when rarely used (lighter, smaller) files bump into more frequently used (heavier, larger) ones, as well as different ways to preview pile contents.

Those are the good parts. The bad? Well, for all the energy invested into the UI, it just isn’t that usable. For example, once I’d previewed the contents of a pile, I couldn’t find a way to drill-down into folders within the pile – double-clicking simply opened up the standard Explorer window. While the attempt at real-world physics is cute, I didn’t find it easy to throw things around the desktop. Instead, I found myself wondering if my document had merged with the pile or simply lay ontop. Sometimes I would aim at a pile but the document would be eaten by the trash bin – it was safer just to drag & drop like normal.

The photo-frame previews and to-do lists are nice touches, but they don’t exactly bring anything new to the table. The ability to switch between walls is useful, but there’s no difference here from multiple desktops under, say, KDE. Also, the Facebook & Twitter widgets would probably be superfluous to anyone already using their preferred client.

Integration

The other downside, which technically isn’t BumpTop’s fault, is its limited integration with the underlying OS. The 3D space and cute fonts just don’t sit alongside Windows’ native menus, dialogs and chrome. Too often you are shown a modal window or contextual menu, so much that you can’t forget you’re still trapped inside a Windows product. I’m not MS bashing, either; I doubt the forthcoming OSX version will flatter the product much more.

I’m not really sure what BumpTop is aspiring to be. Its certainly clever, but I don’t see how it can claim to ‘make your life easier’ – a few clicks less does not make a serious time-saving product. If it evolves into a full OS, specifically for multi-touch devices, I can see its uses, Until then, its unfortunately little more than Window dressing.