BumpTop makes me sad.
BumpTop is a 3-d, physics-enabled desktop environment, where you can smack icons into each other like billiard balls, throw documents into messy piles, pin sticky notes to the walls, etc. “just like in a real desktop!”.
I’ve actually met a guy or two who worked on BumpTop, and they were good people who were obviously smart and hardworking, so I feel kind of bad dissing their software. But they missed something really obvious, which is that the “desktop” in GUIs is a zone of zero productivity. You don’t get work done there. You don’t receive useful information there or even play games there. It’s a place you go to launch an application if you can’t find it in your Dock or Start Menu, to search for a file if you can’t find it in the Open dialog box, or a place you go to manually rearrange your filesystem if you’re obsessive about that sort of thing. Interacting with the desktop is generally a last resort after other, faster methods of getting to your data have failed you. About the only useful thing you do there is copy files between disks.
Therefore, you want to minimize time spent on the desktop and maximize time spent in applications having fun or being productive. I believe the way to “improve” the desktop is to eliminate the need for it by making it easier to instantly access any of your data in any of your applications.
Dressing the desktop up with goofy animations and physics is completely beside the point. You can make it act more like a physical desktop, but why? The fact that my physical desk is covered with messy piles is a bug, not a feature. BumpTop is a case of taking a computer metaphor too literally, as well as a case of doing something just because you have the technology for it. It looks cool, but I have yet to hear anyone, even its creators, describe a single compelling advantage to using it. So it makes me sad that skilled programmers have put a lot of time into this thing.
Anyway, BumpTop has now been bought by Google, so good for them, I guess. There has been a lot of speculation that Google wants their expertise for developing some kind of multi-touch interface for Android phones or tablets. I wish those guys well and hope that their next project is something a little more practical.
May 13, 2010 at 6:26 pm
It’s enlightening to realize that this completely applies to me if I replace the word “desktop” with “command line”.
May 13, 2010 at 7:27 pm
So true. But there are so many things like this, it’s not only BumpTop.
For me, the desktop is the place where I have my recycle bin (on Windows), because that’s what I’m used to have it. Nothing else is in the desktop, ever (apart from some occasional junk – my computer is as much of a mess as my desk, in terms of docs and stuff), and it’s main function is to have a wallpaper, so it’s less ugly 😛
A few years ago, when I was 16, I drew some sketches about how to make Windows XP’s desktop be productive. I remember trying to come up with something in the line of “emerging windows” that would “come out” of the desktop, but I always ended up coming to the conclusion that people don’t use the desktop, they use the applications and the taskbar. That’s it. It’s like in Firefox, you don’t use your new tab page: you use your toolbar and the websites you visit. You only use the new tab page if you don’t know about middle clicks and alt+enter in the address and search bar. It’s completely pointless!
Hopefully Mozilla won’t be wasting resources in trying to make the new tab page productive… The home page they’re planning for Fx4 is much more important.
May 13, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Sad is right. BumpTop follows a spent, sorry tradition of treating human-computer interaction as an end unto itself. Considering Google’s design philosophy, this has to be their weirdest acquisition yet.
Designing new tools as analogues of old tools without considering the intent of their creation only extends their hindrances. Clay Shirky’s characterization of the old Yahoo Directory is apt: “Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back.” Every interface designer who makes this mistake needs to be locked in a room for a very long time with a copy of Bret Victor’s “Magic Ink”.
A second HCI myth BumpTop typifies is that humans natively think better in 3D than 2D. Yes, we exist in three spatial dimensions, but our senses flatten them into mostly 2D perceptions. Most higher-order planning requires a clear view of all the elements in play, which means fewer and fewer visual obstructions, which means 2D.
May 13, 2010 at 7:37 pm
+1 for Bret Victor’s “Magic Ink”. One of a few pieces of writing that changed how I thought about user interface design. I ought to add it to this blog as a permalink, actually…
May 14, 2010 at 12:47 am
‘Magic Ink’ had the same effect on me, as did The Humane Interface.
I think BumpTop’s designers do have some sort of idea of the problems with the Desktop Metaphor; it’s just too vague to have lead them to the right solution(s). That’s why BumpTop seems to have a few ZUI-like characteristics all while retaining the bad characteristics of the Desktop Metaphor. Get rid the concept of ‘applications’ and the dichotomy between icons and windows, introduce zooming, and your “desktop” will actually be your zone of productivity. BumpTop could have done that, but instead added another layer of complexity on top of a broken metaphor. So close yet so far.
May 14, 2010 at 6:26 am
Yup, “the Desktop” is just that space above my task bar that I never see unless I minimize Firefox, Thunderbird, and whatever PDF and media player windows they launched.
I somehow messed up my KDE task bar and had to unlock it to restore the [launcher-task manager-system tray] default layout. I found there are hundreds of widgets available that you can embed in resizable panels all over KDE’s Plasma desktop. Impressive groundbreaking stuff, but I rarely visit my iGoogle page of widgets, let alone my desktop.
May 14, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I also think it is largely because of the use of multi-touch gestures they want for Android and Chrome OS.
May 14, 2010 at 9:10 pm
@damaged justice
WAit, you made a ‘3-d, physics-enabled’ commandline? Sorry buy couldn’t think any other way to intrepret your words..
May 14, 2010 at 9:17 pm
There are tiled (and hybrid stacked/tiled) window managers that do away with the concept of a desktop. Another would be, a Zooming interface, which would actually be really useful.
May 16, 2010 at 2:47 pm
For me, the desktop is indeed an important part of the computer experience. But not as a playing field or anything else:
1) It’s the thing that fill the screen when the system starts up, so it’s what makes the first impression so someone – and often what makes the first impression on my day, so it should have a nice, but unobtrusive picture. Not a playing field, I don’t want to spend time there, it should just look nice _before_ I do any work at all.
2) It needs to have somewhat largish, easy-to-hit icons in personally predictable places for those applications I’m most likely to launch as the first thing when I open the computer: My browser/mail suite (SeaMonkey), the Office suite (OOo), and for NASA TV, which I often open without doing any work. For anything I’m less likely to need, there’s a good, hierarchically structured (yes, I like it this way) start menu and/or tiny taskbar quickstart icons for those in the middle of the range.
For the rest of the time, esp. once I opened the apps, it should use as little resources as possible and virtually not be there at all. You’re right that it’s not a place for productivity. It’s a place for a first impression after startup, and a place that should lead you as fast as possible to the things you’re most likely to do. Similar to the home page/tab of a browser, actually. And some may see the browser as just another desktop…
May 17, 2010 at 8:16 am
My situation is similar to Robert’s with some important differences: my most important application icons are all on the task bar (which is finally useful in Windows 7). And I almost never reboot my laptop, doing that is always a productivity hit. So the desktop is the thing that I want to cover ASAP whenever I have to reboot (e.g. because of a Windows update). And my real “central interaction point” is Total Commander.
June 7, 2010 at 4:56 pm
I don’t want to take away from your overall message, which I agree with. And it certainly applies to me now that I use a Mac. I rarely even see the Desktop on a Mac.
But back when I used Windows, the Desktop was a rather important part of my workflow. In fact, the roles were reversed: the Start Menu was the dreaded place to go looking when something wasn’t found on the Desktop. (This was Windows XP. I’m not sure if the situation would be the same if I used Windows 7.)
But other than that, I agree with you: the Desktop is pretty useless nowadays.
October 18, 2010 at 2:32 am
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