Another feature of the Chrome or Android OS? Might very well be.
The Wellington Financial Blog is reporting that Google has acquired BumpTop for an as yet undisclosed amount, but the guess is around $40 million.
BumpTop is a desktop replacement that aims to replicate a real world desktop, where items are organized in a more haphazard fashion as opposed to snapping to unseen grids.
The project started as the Master’s Thesis of Anand Agarawala who is now the company’s owner. The company got VC and angel funding in 2007, with Wellington postulating that the company has received $2-3 million of funding so far.
With such a short life span (BumpTop was only released to the public in January of this year) it leaves a lot of doors open for Google to acquire an idea and then capitalize on it, without leaving too many current users in the dark. However, BumpTop Pro users are being promised end-of-life support for the original product.
Until now, BumpTop has been available for download, but the company has posted an entry to its site just yesterday that warns of a change of direction, and a limited amount of time left to grab the application.
For now, if you’d still like to experience BumpTop as is, you can grab a copy from their site.
Looks like some nice technology but the problem I see is that you cannot identify specific documents of a given type or what is in a tidy stack in the icon views. In the document views where you can see the contents of the documents there is less room to maneuver plus load and render times as well as memory consumption have issues of their own.
I think that we can expect that this project may become open source soon and team will work on something new/something for current Google’s project. I’m not 100% sure but look what happened to other projects acquired by Google in last few months.
I don’t get it. Why bring the problems of real-world desks to software desktops? I hate it when my desk has all those files laying around.
TOTALLY agree! Sheesh! Ya’ll should see my scary desk!
Looks pretty nifty. Anyone with a halfway decent graphics card shouldn’t have any issues running it. Well provided its open gl based.
I think it’s something different. We’ve been using a grid desktop system for over 20 years. It might be difficult to find a specific document, but this is something that refreshes the view. Pretty cool. Google rocks!
pretty awesome
I’m probably old fashioned or something, but what’s the point of a bunch of icons w/o filenames?
I personally prefer to use a things like konsole or gnome terminal to organize my files.
Oh year, and how am i supposed to try this if there is no linux version. This is 2010! No linux version? what? it’s 2010, there has to be a linux version :)
This looks to me like some of the functions on Strategy and RPG games. This engine can be used to create many new 3D widgets and applications, after all it is a 3D era!
Came on my Lenovo tablet. Waste of time.
break through…..
Nice effects and eyecandy, but I hate the fact of playing around with my files. I just want them to ben there when I need them.
Smells like Microsoft BOB…there’s a reason file managers and desktops are the way there are now. Because charts and grids make things more uniform and easier to find things. This may look better but in essence require more work/time to get same tasks done. For anyone who uses a computer to get their work done, this would be huge drawback. Not to make it look like flame bait, this is the exact reason touch screen and motion devices are unlikely to ever replace physical keyboard and pointing device. Keyboard/pointing device have greater precision and require less effort to achieve same tasks and while some say this isn’t natural, not all things natural mean they are efficient. Kinda the same thing on Windows one can get more work done than on a Mac, the interface is function over eye candy.
Wonderful. You can make a mess on your computer now too. http://www.instanttaxsolutions.com/
I lovde android but this is only not full linux . i woudlike to visit http://www.zalozeniesro.sk with my android OS.