I got a taste for Bumptop after my friend Vijay recommended Ted. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration. But, videos of all the presentations at the event are available for free viewing. And the content on Ted is quite remarkably polished and innovations presented at TED are nothing short of praiseworthy. 

Bumptop is the dream child of Anand Agarawala and was created at the University of Toronto. Currently the project is in private beta and is available for download only on an invite basis and I was lucky enough to get an invite. Here is the video from TED.

The Beta version does almost most of what is shown in the video and is quite smooth and polished for beta version.

You get a 3d room interface where you put your desktop icons and then you can just grow and shrink those icons using shortcut keys. The shortcuts are very easy learn and the interface is quite intuitive. But, I really think that touch interfaces would be the right arena to utilise bumptop to their fullest potential. The project makes complete use of the mouse and allows you to organize files on your desktop in best possible manner.

Bumptop is actually a boon for people who tend to have a lot of files on their desktop and need to organize (or disorganize) them. The ability to stack documents, form grids/groups, view images by shuffling through them and allowing you hang priority docs on the walls, combined with the real life physics engine makes Bumptop a shining example of what true Innovation we can bring about even with the current technology.

The collision detection system is really great and you would appreciate the way icons/others dangle when you hang them on the wall.

Bumptop shows that innovation need not always be about new technology, it can be about using existing technology to do new things in newer ways.

However, I did find that it ran faster on my slow XP machine with just 1GB of RAM than on my Vista machine with loads and loads of RAM + a Graphics card (Yeah, maybe I should turn anti aliasing off)

Many of my friends asked me to give them an invite to Bumptop, but its not possible for a user to invite others and the only way to get Bumptop is to sign up for their invite at their site. 

While I was waiting for the invite to come by, I did realize the existence of certain clones of Bumptop. One of them was Real Desktop. Real Desktop is quite a good product but the free version is extremely limited in what it offers and once you get an invite to Bumptop, you’ll not go back to Real Desktop (even if you had paid for it).

And before I forget! Here is what my desktop looks like now

My bumptop interface

When I chose to blog about technology as well as physics, I did not realize that physics was quite an unpopular subject for bloggers and web 2.0 enthusiasts. Most probably since noone is interested in boring physics classes. Even in school I was least interested in Physics lessons, primarily because my school lessons focussed on the focal length of lenses and how mirrors reflected each other. Then atlast, I came across Einstein’s theories which intrigued me and made me look at physics with new and renewed interest.

I had discussed about tachyons in one of my earlier posts. Tachyons are theoritical particles which could move at a speed faster than light. However, these particles merely exist in theory because it is impossible for any particle to exceed the speed of light. If a particle were to exceed the speed of light, then it would in fact be able to fly back in time, since it would have arrived before it arrived it had left. But, there is no way any body could exceed the speed of light since, it simply would not be allowed. Let us assume there was an engine which could possibly accelerate to light speeds (299,792,458 miles per second) But after reaching the speed of light, it simply would stop accelerating anymore. So now, the engine is pushing out energy and the body is not moving any faster. Where does the energy go? It gets converted to mass and the mass of the body starts growing to gigantic proportions, but still the body would not move any faster.

The example The speed of light which nothing can overtake is represented by a c which stands for ‘Celeritas‘, which is the latin word for swiftness. This post would really need a more elaborate explanation under the shadow of the all encompassing E = MC² which you could watch out for. or rather not.

A tachyon is a particle which can move at speeds exceeding the speed of light (the C in the formula). I would write more on it later when I get the time to do so..