Bumptop

BumpTop

Original author(s)	Anand Agarawala Bump Technologies Inc.
Developer(s)	Google
Initial release	April 8, 2009 (2009-04-08)
Stable release	2.5 / March 31, 2010; 7 years ago (2010-03-31)
Development status	Open Source
Operating system	Windows XP and later, OS X 10.6 and later
Size	17–21 MB
Type	Desktop environment
License	Apache license
Website	bumptop.github.io

BumpTop was a skeuomorphic desktop environment app that stimulates the normal behavior and physical properties of a real-world desk and enhances it with automatic tools to organize its contents. It is aimed at stylus interaction, making it more suitable for tablet computers and handheld PCs. It was created at the University of Toronto as Anand Agarawala's master's thesis. Anand Agarawala also gave a presentation at the TED conference about his idea. The 1.0 version was released on April 8, 2009, along with a fully featured pro version as a paid upgrade. On April 30, 2010 the author announced that BumpTop was being discontinued and that they were taking the software "in an exciting new direction." Two days later, it was announced that the company had been acquired by Google. On January 5, 2011, Google released a sneak preview video of Android 3.0 Honeycomb showing a 3D desktop with features purportedly taken from BumpTop.

In BumpTop, documents are represented as three-dimensional boxes lying on a virtual desk. The user can position the boxes on the desk using the stylus or mouse. Extensive use of physics effects like bumping and tossing is applied to documents when they interact, for a more realistic experience. Boxes can be stacked with well-defined gestures. Multiple selection is performed by means of a LassoMenu, which fluidly combines in one stroke the act of lasso selection and action invocation via pie menus. BumpTop currently supports Windows XP, Vista, and 7, and a version for Mac OS X was released into private beta on January 18, 2010. The Mac edition omits the pie menu in favor of a more normal selection menu.