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The New New Desktop
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Judging by Mrs. Feiler Faster, the big buzz coming out of the TED Conference a few weeks back was a new interface for your computer desktop. She hasn't stopped talking about it, though maybe this blog entry by my old classmate at Yale, David Pogue, might get her to stop:

A Canadian programmer named Anand Agarawala presented a new computer-desktop filing system that was, to say the least, novel. The audience spent quite a bit of time giggling, ooh-ing and ahh-ing.

The status quo, Anand pointed out, is a desktop filled with icons. “You can sex it up with a ‘lickable’ interface like the Mac’s, but basically it’s the same old thing: Point and click, icons.”

In his revised version, icons behave a lot more like actual sheets and bundles of paper. As you drag them around the screen, they tumble and pile up. They collide with other icons, tumbling and shoving them pell-mell out of the way.

You can drag a dotted line around a group of icons to stack them into piles, which you can then click through, flip through, or spread out like a deck of cards. You can then add another icon to a pile by tossing it with your mouse, and grinning as it flies to the top of the pile as though you have perfect aim.

You can make an especially important icon bigger by dragging it; once it’s bigger, it’s also heavier, so that it pushes other icons out of the way. You can even crease and fold icons, as though to dogear them. You can even crumple icons up and toss them into a corner of the screen.

The desktop, meanwhile, looks like the inside of a box—and you can actually pin things up on the walls of it, or make shelves.

You can see a less charming version of the presentation in this YouTube video. (This video seems to emphasize this concept’s use on a tablet computer, but the TED demo was done on a regular laptop.)

As you’ll surely agree, there’s a huge entertainment factor in Bumptop Desktop, as it’s called. Unfortunately, it’s not especially practical.

For starters, none of the icons have names. A pile of PDF documents is fun to ruffle through, but their icons all look identical. There doesn’t seem to be any facility for creating folders, either, which, despite their clutter and their crusty age, do serve a practical purpose: you can have several open at once and, because they overlap, still keep them straight. It’s not clear how you’d achieve a similar arrangement in the folderless Bumptop world.

I’m guessing that replacing what we see in Mac OS X or Windows is not, ultimately, the point. It’s to start thinking, start playing, run some experiments, to exploit today’s high-powered graphics routines to bring some new life to the crusty old desktop metaphor. The results of this tomfoolery may not bring Apple or Microsoft to Anand’s doorstep, but maybe the Bumptop fun will at least rub off on those much bigger players.

Labels: Technology

Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM
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