BumpTop and the Art of Desktop Maintenance

My desk is disorganized with papers, files, folders, pens, staplers, half drunk coffee cup…you get the picture! I have to struggle with my inner demons to clear clutter on a regular basis, and it’s not fun.  I don’t know about you, but my virtual desktop has a close resemblance to my real desk. It is a daily battle to keep my desktop from looking visually out of control. So, imagine the excitement when I first learned about BumpTop. 

With BumpTop, you can do everything you do on your real desktop – pile one document over another, stick a note on the wall, keep your printer next to your table, have photos of family displayed next to you, etc. If you love to dabble with new software, BumpTop can provide hours of entertainment, and a fun way to organize your electronic documents and program shortcuts. Don’t want that excel sheet anymore? Just toss it towards the trash can. Want to print the proposal? Move it to the printer next to your “table”.

Most of us write our Master’s thesis to get a decent GPA.  Anand Agarawala’s thesis produced BumpTop.  Google noticed and bought BumpTop in 2010. At first blush, Bumptop seems simply like a 3D desktop organizer. Big deal!  But it really is a sophisticated user interface. For those of you familiar with Microsoft’s Surface technology, BumpTop “feels” the same.  I used the word “feel” intentionally, because the technology enables you to interact more intuitively with your desktop.  What is cool about Bumptop is that it simulates the physical properties of real life object  – papers can be tossed into folders, icons stuck to the wall dangle if not properly “pinned”.  Icons have weight and physicality that make them behave like objects in the real world. Instead of point and click, you toss and flip!

A lasso style selection of multiple objects can be done to sort them by type. For example if you have many Word documents, PDF files, and Excel spreadsheets scattered all over your desktop, you can select them all by using a “lasso”, and putting them in visually neat stack by type.  When you want to find a document you simply double click on a stack, and it spreads the documents out for you. A free Bumptop version can be downloaded from Cnet, but be wary of unwanted programs sneaking in on you.

Now my desktop looks like a beautiful mess!