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Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

Just now I was playing with BumpTop: http://bumptop.com/ . It's quite cool but definitely needs work before being a replacement for the OS desktop.

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BumpTop strikes me as more of a slick tech demo more than it is a real product - sort of like way back when someone modded DOOM to display system processes (and can kill them with the shotgun). Amusing, gets oohs and aahs from the audience, but ultimately doesn't really increase anyone's productivity.

I'm not convinced we need full-3D graphics and physics simulations just to work a computer.

What we do need, IMHO, is more pervasive hardware acceleration at the OS level, and rich support for animations. Windows fails horribly at this, but they're making promising strides - motion is one of those important UI bits that has basically been ignored up until now.

Do you have any suggestions for how we could improve BumpTop?

I have 1.6 million files on my computer at the moment. Not sure how they'd map to bumptop. Even just photos; all the demos I've seen limit files to only a dozen or so. How would you manage a few thousand photos?

1.6 million files break down in most viewing paradigms. In BumpTop you can turn on "infinite workspace" and you can have thousands of files. Then use pile by type or date to automatically make that more manageable.

For starters, it only works with the Desktop folder, not any other folders. Personally, I like to keep my Windows desktop very tidy and so having the power of BumpTop is useless.

It would be great if BumpTop can navigate the full drive and directory tree using the cool features of BumpTop without resorting to Explorer and without being tied to the desktop.

BumpTop already works on any folder :)

We have an experimental "Bump This Folder" shell extension, which provides a little button in Windows Explorer that turns the current view into a BumpTop. It needs to be enabled in the BumpTop settings.

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