The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I have to admit that I am quite a neat freak. I like to start and finish my day at school with a desk that is as clean as is possible. I can't stand a big mess and I always wonder how people can work in an environment like that. I know how people talk about not being able to find things after they have cleaned, but I know a lot more people who can't find anything before they have cleaned. The same is true for my computers. While some people fill their desktops with stuff, hoping they will stumble upon the file they need, I try to organize my stuff so that I always know which folder to look in. But this model of the desktop for personal computers has been around for almost as long as most people can remember. Neatly organized into a hierarchical structure of folders and documents, we can navigate through a maze of information stacks quite quickly. However, it is really not very realistic. We all have our piles of stuff that we keep together. Notes, pictures, e-mail, all surrounding a certain project we are working on. Or piles of CDs, all with songs on them that we need to file. Our real life piles are different from our desktop piles. But with BumpTop, they don't need to be. An experiment designed by two researchers at the University of Toronto, BumpTop is an extension of the desktop idea of the computer. Modeled on the physics and graphics programming of the latest computer games, BumpTop lets your desktop come alive and become a much more realistic space. Using a cursor like tool, you can move it around, bumping into the icons that are sitting on your desktop, scattering them around. You can make piles of different kinds of documents, stacking things together into piles that are more like the real piles you have. You can crumple up the icons on your desktop, reminding you to throw things in the trash later. You can sort, pile, preview, throw, and stack the items that you have sitting on your desktop, shuffling icons like cards, setting them up on their side to make more room for the piles that you have created. You can organize all of the Word documents in one part of your desktop, the pictures in another, and then MP3s in a third, only to mess them all up as you throw a completed PowerPoint presentation through the entire mess. The creators of this tool have set up a preview video on YouTube after the servers at the University of Toronto crashed soon after they uploaded their demo. The demo video is amazing to watch and makes it easy to understand the power of a tool such as this. We're all used to quiet, static desktops where we hunt for files and hope they stay organized, but after watching the video it is easy to understand the power of the change that this represents. Several other companies over the years have tried to change the model of the desktop, the most prominent failure being Microsoft's BOB, an attempt to remodel the computer's filing system around a house that had different rooms and clickable objects, which would load certain programs and enable tasks to be started. But in the end, being the mid-1990s, the world wasn't ready for BOB and it never really got past the demonstration stage of interesting technologies. There are a lot of technologies that are just over the computing horizon. Computers that anticipate what we are looking for and lead us to these items, whether they are online or on our machines. Computers that know when we want to be interrupted with e-mail and telephone calls, and which will close us off from others when we are deep in work. More importantly, computers which will be able to tell which e-mail and telephone calls are important enough to interrupt us with. All of these things will be here in the next few years, and they will be a fundamental change in how we work with our machines, making them stronger, smarter, and much more helpful and realistic. BumpTop for now is just an interesting demonstration, but it is the beginning of something much larger. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
