BumpTop Gets Multi-Touch Support on Windows 7

October 1st, 2009 by Patrick Dubroy

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

Multi-touch Gesture: Wall FocusMulti-touch Gesture: 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.

BumpTop Scrunch GestureFirst, 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.

BumpTop Flick GestureBumpTop Fan-out Gesture

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.

BumpTop Photo-crop Gesture

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.

Update: See other coverage at TechCrunch, Venture Beat, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker.

27 Comments ↓

Leave a Comment