If someone’s stature is determined by the amount of clutter on their desk, then comp sci master’s graduate Anand Agarawala must be a big shot on campus.
And though he seemed particularly adept at pushing paper, photos, and files around-all with the tip of one finger-his clutter was of the virtual kind.
Compare that with the frustration of using a “stylus” on a touch-screen monitor or a tablet PC, Agarawala said. “When you try to double-click with a pen it’s a real pain in the ass.”
So he made it his master’s thesis in 2004 to design a “pen and finger-friendly” computer desktop interface. He worked with Ravin Balakrishnan of the department of computer science.
Their product, called BumpTop, allows users to interact with files on a computer desktop much as they would at their own, real-world desks. You can toss files around, stack them by type or date and flip through them, or even tack them to the sides of the workspace. Pressing assignments can be made to loom large on the desktop; once complete, they can be “crumpled up,” before being deleted.
The same computer program used simulate the carnage in games such as Unreal Tournament controls the bumping and bouncing of files in Agarawala’s BumpTop. And after showing it off in May at a meeting of DevCamp, (“A ‘who’s who’ in the Toronto IT scene,” said Agarawala), BumpTop has been generating buzz.
Technology blogs Slashdot and Digg have picked it up, as has CBC News. Some geeks in the blogosphere cheered Agarawala’s demonstration video; others challenged BumpTop’s visual metaphor.
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“The correct solution to a bunch of file icons all over your desktop is NOT to come up with a better way of stacking them and manipulating them,” groused a reader of LifeHacker.com, which also “linked” to BumpTop.
A fully-working version might be ready in the fall. “We want to push towards a beta,” said Agarawala. “I guess we’re exploring the commercial option.”
But, as with any master’s project, all is not quite right.
“There’s still bugs in it, to some degree,” he winced, as a rebellious pile of files unfurled across the virtual desktop.
