Ever since we launched BumpTop 1.0 last year, we’ve had people asking us when we were going to release a Mac version. Well, today we’re happy to say that the wait is over — say hello to BumpTop for Mac!
BumpTop for Mac is not just a port of our Windows version; it’s been re-written from the ground up to seamlessly integrate with Mac OS X features like Exposé and Quick Look. It’s got all the best features from the Windows version — piles, sticky notes, and icons that you can resize and pin to the walls. But we’ve also added some slick Mac-only features, like multi-touch trackpad gestures, and the new pile flipping functionality.
Well, what are you waiting for? Go download BumpTop for Mac. Just like on Windows, there’s a free version as well as a fully-featured Pro version for $29.
A while back, we gave you a sneak preview of some of the new multi-touch features we were hard at work on this summer. I showed off our basic gestures, but mentioned that we’re a few really cool gestures that I couldn’t tell you about yet. Well, I’m happy to say that I can finally talk about them. Today, we’re announcing BumpTop 1.2, which contains some awesome new multi-touch features for Windows 7.
Check it all out in the video, or read on for more details. You can also check out our full gesture guide.
Pan and Zoom
As you’d expect with any multi-touch application, BumpTop uses multi-touch gestures to pan and zoom. Dragging with two fingers on the desktop will pan the view around your desktop. Spreading two fingers apart on the desktop zooms in, and pinching the fingers together zooms out. You can also the spread/pinch gestures on individual items to grow and shrink them. Pretty cool, eh?
One of my favourite gestures is two-finger tap: when objects are selected, tapping with two fingers zooms into those objects. A two-finger tap on a photo also takes you into slideshow mode.
Wall Focus, Rotate
In BumpTop, sometimes it’s helpful to shift your focus to one of the walls to get a better look at items on it. Pulling down with two fingers not he back wall focuses your view on it. Then, you can use the rotate gesture to rotate your view in either direction to focus on the other walls.
Beyond Pan and Zoom
One of the key features of BumpTop is piles. With piles, you can quickly unclutter your desktop by selecting a bunch of items and putting them into a pile, all in one quick step. We’ve got some really innovative gestures to help you work with piles.
First, there are two ways you can create a pile with multi-touch: first, there’s lasso ‘n cross, which is the traditional way of creating a pile in BumpTop. But one of our coolest new multi-touch gestures is scrunch. It’s easiest to describe with a picture (see right).
To pile a bunch of items, just “scrunch” with 3 or more fingers around them. Super useful.
Another helpful gesture when you’re dealing with lots of objects is shove. Just use the side of your finger (pinky or thumb works best) to push items to the side.
Once you’ve got all your items in a pile, we’ve got two helpful gestures for peeking inside it: a quick flick to the left lets you flip through the pile like a deck of cards. Or, you can fan out a pile like a deck of cards by dragging on it with two fingers.
One More Thing
One last gesture that we know you’re going to love is the photo crop gesture. When you’re in slideshow mode, touch the photo with one finger, then swipe horizontally or vertically with another finger to crop the photo along that line.
Get it in BumpTop Pro!
If you want to get your hands on this, you’ll need a touch-capable machine running Windows 7. Multi-touch support is only available in BumpTop Pro, but even without the advanced gestures, BumpTop is a natural fit on touch machines. Give it a try!
A full guide to the multi-touch gestures in BumpTop is available here.
When we launched the 1.0 version of BumpTop, we were pretty amazed with the response. Since then, one of our goals has been “BumpTop Everywhere”: to bring our unmatched user experience to as many people as we can. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve moved one step closer to that by partnering with some of the largest graphics card makers in the world. HIS, PowerColor and SAPPHIRE are going to be bundling a free copy of our software with their graphics cards, bringing BumpTop to millions more users.
Of course this is great news for us, but it’s great for our new users too. BumpTop lets them leverage their powerful 3D cards not just for games, but also for day-to-day use. As Jon Peddie said, “This pairing allows graphics vendors to demonstrate the value of 3D graphics every time the user sits down at the computer – and it’s fun to use.”
This is just the beginning of what’s going to be an interesting few months in the BumpTop world. We’re hoping to have some more exciting news to announce in that time — so keep your eye on this space. (You are subscribed to our RSS feed, right?)
A few weeks ago, we launched this blog with a post by Anand Agarawala, the CEO and co-founder of BumpTop. In his post, Anand recapped some of the exciting things that have happened to BumpTop over the past few months. The biggest, of course, was that we launched our 1.0 version back in April. (Has it been that long already?) But there was one thing — a pretty BIG thing — that Anand neglected to mention.
Hi everybody! Just to quickly introduce myself: my name’s Patrick Dubroy, and I joined BumpTop a few months ago after finishing my master’s degree in human-computer interaction. One of my roles at BumpTop is going to be taking the lead on this blog, so you’ll be hearing lots from me. I also write about programming, interaction, and HCI over on my personal blog.
Right now I’d like to talk about some of the other stuff I’ve been working on since I started at BumpTop. One of the new features we’re most excited about is multitouch support. The upcoming version of Windows (Windows 7) includes new APIs to support multi-finger gestures on a touchscreen computer. We think BumpTop is a great way to take advantage of multitouch to actually make you more productive in your day-to-day tasks. Read on to find out why, or if you’re more of a visual person, you can see it all in the video:
Fluid and Natural Interaction
BumpTop was originally designed for tablet and touch computers (see Anand’s master’s thesis), so even without adding any multitouch-specific features, many things already feel really fluid and natural on a touch system. For example, items on your desktop behave like real objects, with weight and inertia. This is something that’s recommended for touch applications in order to give them a natural feel, but it’s been in BumpTop from the beginning. Another feature I really like is the ability to a bunch of items into a pile with one quick, fluid gesture that we call “lasso ‘n cross”:
Radial Menus
If you try to use a regular Windows application on a touch screen, you’ll quickly notice how hard it is to click on menu items, because they’re so small compared to the size of your finger. BumpTop uses radial menus, like this:
If you’re into HCI at all, you might know that radial menus offer a lot of benefits over linear menus. One of the advantages is that every item is the same distance away. For BumpTop, this means that we can make the targets large enough to hit easily on a touchscreen without making any of them too far away.
A second advantage of radial menus is that they support habitual gestures really well, because the target is selected by direction, and not by distance. After a while, you’ll be able to invoke commands using your muscle memory, like I do when I break a pile at 1:40 in the video.
These are just a few of the things that make BumpTop nice to use on a touch system, but they only require a single point of touch. What about multitouch?
Multitouch Gestures
If you’ve ever used a multitouch system, such as the iPhone or Microsoft Surface, you’re probably familiar with the most common multitouch gestures: using two fingers to zoom, pan, and rotate. In BumpTop, these gestures can be used for changing the position of the camera. By putting two fingers down on the desktop and spreading them apart, you can zoom in to get a better look at a certain area. Dragging with two fingers on the desktop causes the camera to pan around, and you can zoom back out again using the pinch gesture.
Coming Soon!
This is cool, but it’s just scratching the surface of what you can do with multitouch. Almost every multitouch demo I’ve ever seen demonstrates the same pinch, pan, and rotate gestures. When designing your application, you should think about what you can do that’s different. For BumpTop, we’ve implemented some really cool gestures — which we unfortunately can’t tell you about just yet — that we think really take things to the next level. Keep an eye out for them an in upcoming release.
Hey everybody! Welcome (finally) to the BumpTop blog. We’ve been meaning to get a blog going for a while now, but as you can probably imagine, we’ve been pretty busy over the past few months. After a year in private beta, we publicly launched version 1.0 of BumpTop just under three months ago.
It was a pretty amazing feeling to finally be launching our little baby to the world. The press coverage was awesome — news of the launch was picked up by hundreds of news agencies and more than a thousand blogs. At launch, “bumptop” was a trending topic on Twitter. We made the front page of some of the most popular tech sites, like Gizmodo, Engadget, and Lifehacker. Even more incredible was getting press from some of the traditional media, including The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, NBC, and ABC. It even got covered in Entertainment Weekly! How crazy is that?
So all in all, it was a pretty crazy couple of months at Bump HQ. Now that things are settled down a bit, we can concentrate on making BumpTop even better: fixing bugs, polishing the user experience, and adding new features. We’ll be using this blog to keep you in the loop on what we’re doing, so check back soon! Or better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed.
